a/n ; does anyone even read this
Despite his well-meaning advice, I respectfully finish my breakfast, carry on a thread-thin conversation with him and inevitably take my leave. He works from home: I think that's really interesting, actually, seeing how much wealth can accumulate to later accommodate your lifestyle like a mold, a cast specifically for you. Office on the first floor, living arrangements on the second and third; he's so antiquated, so quaint, I can hardly imagine why he'd involve himself with the FBI. Stay at home and absorb finery like a sponge and spend more time accumulating evidence of his bourgeois status—why bother with this sort of discomfort?
The way that I envision him to be an anachronism from another era isn't the same way I view the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Dr. Lecter is antiquated, this place is archaic, antediluvian; I expect to see an iron maiden with pulpy bits of flesh clinging to the spines within, evidence of the medieval, barbaric activity that I'm certain transpires in this place. The office was pleasant enough, but the lower I go, the danker it gets. The moisture in the air—condensation, oozing from the pores of the prisoners, from us, from the stone—clings to my skin like a film, and I lick my lips and wipe my brow in a toxic cocktail of apprehension and discomfort as Dr. Chilton escorts Dr. Bloom and me to my predecessor, my test model.
"He's been rather finicky recently," Dr. Chilton comments, his voice tight and nasally, "and I can't seem to get anything down his gullet. He eats like a finch. Peck of this, peck of that—I'm uncertain as to whether or not to classify this as an eating disorder or just him trying to be as difficult as possible." A certain drone accentuates his tone: I think he's been having problems with Will for so long that, as soon as they're normalized and he accepts them as a standard, Mr. Graham probably just finds another way to be a nuisance. And I can see why: Dr. Chilton is far more physically radiant than Dr. Lecter, because even with a limp and a cane and a stiff shoulder, his skin is robust and fair, but he lacks the same practically tangible aura of knowledge, of otherworldly understanding. He's just too human: you can't trust someone so unqualified to unlock your head like a diary. Dr. Lecter's humanity was an afternote portrayed in his hobbies, his faint brushes of emotion, but Dr. Chilton's is portrayed in his flaws and shortcomings. I don't think he's that bad of a person, despite how vehemently Dr. Bloom accuses him of mistreatment, claims that he's a washed up salesman eking his way into the psychological circle. Inefficient, she described, rude, impatient. Those are the marks of a person struggling to help themselves, not their patient.
"He might be sick," Dr. Bloom suggests, and Chilton does everything in his power to shrug despite his shoulder being occupied in supporting his weight down into his cane. A flying buttress holding up a cathedral's massive foundation; in the end, I guess, Chilton is the furthest thing from holy.
"No, no, sick is a good way to describe him," Chilton muses, and I see the lines framing Alana's mouth tighten.
He leaves, Alana glares at him, and he exits the room with the door sliding behind him like bad special effects in Star Trek. There's a chair—two, to be exact—in front of a cage, akin to the kind that people who dive into the ocean to find sharks use. Shark cage. Will Graham's inside the shark cage, of course, but I hate to think that's him, this is the guy that everyone gets their rocks off to, that even Dr. Lecter seems obsessed with, possessing an unexplainable predilection for. I want to depersonalize this, turn into a stone statue as I listen and he pays no attention to me. Too late, I guess, because Alana turns her head and her curls bob around her face, offering him a smile that exudes illuminated warmth, unspoken affection.
The way she and Will greet each other is sparse though tightly-woven—there's no time to get a word in, not between Will's pinched facial expressions taking the place of his words and Alana's downcast gaze filtering through her eyelashes substitutes for her (undoubtedly worn out) words of condolence. Though not explicitly mournful, I certainly feel like an intrusion—I'd have the decency to manifest some semblance of pity in the dry well of my empathetic capabilities if Will had not almost entirely treated me like he hated me.
"Who's this?" he asks, and his voice already drips with heavy scorn, his diction tainted. The sarcasm that must have been charming when he wasn't accused of being a serial killer soaks his tone. "I'm always delighted to see new faces." A grimace churned into something unidentifiable after it becomes spliced with a smile smears across his face: I find myself tepidly hoping for Alana to reprimand him like an unruly child, but she does nothing but furrow her brow and purse her lips.
"Special Agent Ameya Thakore," I state, and I do my best to sound aloof; my inspiration for this piece comes from the specific lilt of Dr. Lecter's voice when he drawls his own name, "Doc-tor Han-ni-bal Lec-ter." "I'm working with Jack Crawford in your absence."
"I thought it'd be good for him to meet you," Alana supplies, her voice inserted between the two of us to prevent the inevitable friction; she's so stressed, her pale face tight and drawn, and her skin is like a canvas. Guilt for my actions—not for how I treated Graham but rather how I presented myself to a colleague—prevents me from saying anything further. The desperate, hanging void tipping over the edge of her tongue collapses, and I see the lapse in her stoic professionalism: why are they so adamant about acting like mannequins? "The most progress we made—if you could call it progress at all—was with you. The faster we sort out the ripper case means the fast we sort out your own," she hypothesizes aloud, vocalizing the thoughts that drip like mildew from the corners of her hopes.
"Impart my knowledge upon him, then," Will says, like he's actually considering, before he gives a small laugh, a sharp exhale coupled with a smile. "All right. How's this going to work? Let me just tell you all the theories I've already told Crawford, told everyone, so that they can deny it when it comes from your mouth instead of mine. Is that a step forward, back, or is that just us keeping our feet planted straight on the ground? I can't really say from this angle."
"I'm doing my best to help," I defend, my voice tight as my throat swells with vain, petty hatred of this man who dares rival my intellect and my place: I've become accustomed to his, and I refuse to let him have it back. I don't like thinking about being second place—this is so much less of a job, now, and more of a rite of passage. He failed, I can succeed: there are people I need to impress. Alana seems sullen, though evidently bitter, that despondent misery settling in her veins like silt. She wrings her fingers, twists the skin around her bones like a ring, before she nods hesitantly.
"We all are. I think…" and she pauses, before nodding, verifying that her decision's stability is rigid, that this ought to transpire, no matter how much it makes her skin prick and her brow furrow and her jaw clench, "I'll leave the two of you alone." She lets her voice age, the tremors flitting from nerve to nerve within both our brains as we do our best to process her intent, and she gives both of us a curt smile, mine rimmed with a pleading sort of aftertaste and Will's with lingering apologies. She leaves, her small heels tapping against the floor like a metronome, and I peer at the empty seat beside me. The openness of this room is suffocating.
"Chilton records everything we say." Will says it so blandly, and when I manage to force my eyes to his, he shrugs and frowns comically, an exaggerated shrug moving expressively under his uniform, bland clothes. "An ongoing experiment. Give him some good data, won't we? Just a couple of hunters chatting about their latest prey—and let me tell you, he is a slippery bastard."
There's nothing for me to say without it appearing as an interjection, an unnecessary comment. I nod.
"Intelligent, precise, articulate—these pieces are not arranged through primal instinct and necessity but through an incredibly human predilection with the artistic." His words are enunciated, stress visible in the arching muscles in his throat, and his reluctance, I think, has been mistaken for him hiding something. It's uncomfortable for him to talk about, the way he avoids meeting eyes, the way he gesticulates to distract from his words. I nod again.
"The murders always happened in lieu of an event: logically," he nods to me, eyes downcast, "these murders are not random. They are individual works of art—each one is completely different."
"They're not that different," I protest, my voice jejunely cracking, and Will holds a finger before him, sighing.
"Surgical trophies and immaculate precision link them together. An evident knowledge of inside information further links them. Unless Freddie Lounds is an accomplice and feeding him every classified, minute detail of the other crimes being investigated, it's only common sense to assume that the ripper is involved in his own case."
I don't see the connection. Disbelief and unconvinced confusion paints itself over my face, and Will seems frustrated, though patiently so. He jumped from shred to shred, contradicted himself, wove together the shoddiest tapestry he could out of scraps. There is no semblance in his reasoning, but yet the tremors in his voice betray his utter sincerity: he's convinced. Something only he can understand, feel, grasp, but never articulate. He just knows. After all, he would do the same in the ripper's place, and thus can only reason that the ripper must have the same idea.
"You're saying," I begin, slow and steady, balancing needles on their heads, "that the ripper is involved in the case as in he—or she, or they—work for the FBI or are otherwise able to access classified or difficult to obtain information before it is usually released to the public." I meant to slit the abdomen of the topic with a scalpel, shallow, explicitly absolute with perfect precision, but I, essentially, gutted it with a cleaver. Too clumsy: Will is disappointed, though it only registers as a small shake of his head and a sarcastic sneer. Smile. Grin. Not sure yet.
"I said that. What I'm saying now is that I know who the ripper is. Think about it: articulate, assured, intelligent, precise, possessing incredible anatomical and medical knowledge as well as inside information to the details of each of these cases, someone with no motive besides to play God, as he does with his other guinea pigs and patients, as he does to everyone he meets." The assurance, the pride: my head feels full, his thymognosis as myopic as ever. I don't understand, and I don't hope to ever. I don't give any indication that I want him to continue, but he does, most likely using those filthy tendrils of empathy and self-awareness to seep into my own head and pry loose every figment of curiosity from my restrained conscience. He would want to know the same, if he was me, but he isn't.
"It's Hannibal Lecter," he says blandly, and I was so immersed in the suspense, the dark, fermented brew of his assurance, that breaking the surface now feels like I've swallowed salt water and my lungs have shriveled.
This is no anagnorisis. How well it settles after the initial, hysteric impulse of shock is troubling.
