Epilogue for Iris
I couldn't tell you why I fell in love with the big, handsome liar. I knew right off that he was lying to me. He was a professional liar; had to be. So smooth: intimacy offered with twinkling blue eyes and a crooked smile. But the intimacy was faked and behind that smile was a sea of hidden mysteries. And those eyes? Behind the twinkling blues was an endless darkness, pain piled upon pain. Deep-eyed sadness that stretched back through years of trauma. Eyes full of guilt. Eyes full of half-hidden anger at betrayal after betrayal. And there was something else. It took me a long time to realize that something else was death. "Detective Riley" was a killer.
Falling in love was the wrong choice on so many levels. Choice! As if I had a choice. I fought it but, in the end, I couldn't ignore my feelings for him. Even though I knew he was lying to me. Even though I knew it went against all my principles, against all my training. I could have lost my job and I love my job. None of that mattered because I loved him.
Whomever he really was.
I had grown-up with cops around me. Most of my family wore the uniform. And it was obvious "Riley" was no cop. He was no detective. He was no cop even though he had a personnel file full of commendations going back years. And his name wasn't "Riley" even though that's what it said in his file and in all his background checks. That name was just one more of his lies.
After a while I came to accept the lies. He had his reasons, I knew. And he thought they were good ones. I believed that if I earned his trust then one day he would let me into his world. He would explain the many mysteries that were his life. He would tell me the truth about who he really was and what he did – those "extracurricular activities" that had nothing to do with the job NYPD paid him to do. I'd seen him in action and it was like he could see things nobody else could see. He could see things before they happened. He knew where to be and what to expect, and he saved lives.
That was the one thing that overshadowed all the lies and the mysteries. He saved lives. He helped people and he saved lives. They wanted me to evaluate him because they thought he used excessive force. They thought he hurt people and enjoyed it. But he didn't like to hurt people. He just did what he had to do. Things that were necessary. Things that nobody else could do.
There were bad people out there and he was doing things that the rest of the force couldn't – or wouldn't – do. The rest of the force couldn't understand what I came to understand: that he saw what had to be done and he just did it. Procedures, rules, laws: they never stopped him from doing what he thought he had to do. The other cops couldn't see what he saw and so they decided he was a crazy paranoid cop with authority issues. They didn't understand him like I did. They didn't realize that the Departmental procedures they all followed were like chains to him. The rules got in his way. The rules kept him from doing what needed to be done. John did what he did outside all the procedures and all the rules, and he saved lives by doing it.
If he followed the rules then people would die.
I didn't push him to open up. Sometimes he did – just a little. But mostly he stayed closed and I let him know I accepted him the way he was. I told myself that I didn't need to know his story and why he did what he did. Some of that was true. I didn't need to know; but I really wanted to know. I wanted to know all about the man I had fallen in love with.
One time he came close to telling me something true. He came to me in the precinct. He was trying to hide it but by then I knew him well enough to see through the veneer. He wasn't scared; he never got scared. But this was the closest he'd ever come to it. I guess desperate would be the best description. Quiet, intense, and desperate. He told me to get out of The City for my own good. Something big was happening and he wanted me safe. He pretty much admitted what I'd long known: he was no cop. Whatever he was, some "wrong people" might figure it out too, and he thought they might come for me – because he said they would come for anybody he cared about. I tried to get him to tell me more but that was all I could get out of him. I made him promise to tell me what was going on and he said he would. He said he would explain everything, tell me the whole story, the next time we saw each other. I got the feeling he didn't think that was ever going to happen. But he promised me, and I believed him.
That was another lie. When it was over – whatever "it" was – he never told me anything. I loved him anyway.
I'm a big girl. I grew up around cops and that toughened me. I got a Ph.D. in behavioral psychology and I understand feelings and motivations. I talk to cops every day about what's going on for them and I try to help them deal with the incredible stresses that go along with their jobs. Other people couldn't handle that but I can. So I didn't go to pieces when John told me it was over between us. He pulled out all the guilt and betrayal and darkness from his past, and wrapped it around him like a blanket of sadness, using it to build a bulletproof vest that I could never get through. I walked away, leaving him to face his demons all alone.
But I never stopped loving him.
Somebody said that the Chinese have this curse: "May you live in interesting times." Meaning that interesting times suck. Much better to live in boring times of quiet prosperity and relative safety. Only the Chinese never actually said any such thing. Nobody knows where the saying comes from, but it doesn't come from the Chinese. That's another lie they tell us.
The time after John broke-up with me was "interesting" in the way the supposed Chinese curse meant that word. History is not going to know what to make of that time. Those of us who lived it can't begin to make sense of it. In the space of a few weeks there was an assassination attempt on the President and some big scandal in the Senate. And there was the ICE-9 cyberattack and the hack into the Navy ship that launched a missile into The City. And there was a scandal in the NYPD and several high-ranking officers were arrested. Others disappeared. In John's precinct several officers lost their lives in a mysterious shoot-out. And that was just here in The City. Across the country lots of people lost their lives and even more lost their jobs. After the cyberattack, everything just shut down for a while. The looting was intense. The City's Finest did their best but it wasn't enough. I noticed John wasn't around, and I wondered where he was and what he was doing. I missed him. But more importantly, the City missed him.
It was a chaotic and confusing time, to say the least. Dangerous, too. Most of us stayed in our apartments and watched the news, waiting for somebody to tell us what was going on and when it would be over. I remember 9/11. I had just gotten my undergrad degree in psychology earlier that summer and I was focused on gearing up for grad school. And then the planes hit The Towers and the world changed before our eyes. We all sat in front of our TVs, watching in disbelief as the pundits tried to make sense of it all. This time was like that time, only fifteen years later. The world was changing and we didn't understand how or why.
John would have understood it better, I think. That sixth sense he had for seeing danger before it happened would have guided him through the attacks and he would have been in the thick of things, shooting looters in the knees and saving lives. But he wasn't anywhere to be found.
Somehow we all got through that time – just as we all got through 9/11 – and, afterwards, after all the chaos had calmed and order was restored, we paused to reflect, to see where we had all ended up. Things seemed to return to normal but most of us knew better. "Normal" was just a thin façade that covered a world of strangeness we didn't understand. Anything could happen at any time. We didn't understand what had happened or why or how, but we knew that we were all vulnerable. Our wired, inter-connected, society was like a house of cards and it could be shaken to the ground in a moment. Like that house of cards, the cyberattack and all the other bizarre activities had shaken my City and my country – and the world – to their foundations. I found myself looking around me, wondering what was going to happen next. I realized I was looking for John. Silly me. I just couldn't let him go.
And then one day the phone rang.