This chapter and the next, Sword, form a two-shot called 'Lie to Me'. Dark themes and a decent amount of cursing. Enjoy.

Kara x


29.) Murder

A man is dead.

Andien Polyi, 37-year-old male, presented with insomnia and delirium. I figured it was a textbook drug addiction case, but when he started twitching like an OCD person in a junkyard, then I had to reconsider my perspective. A long, convoluted process resulted in his eventual diagnosis, and then a much shorter, far simpler process led to him in a body bag and me gone, running for my life, chasing answers.

A man is dead because of me.

But I didn't pull the trigger.


I knew it was you. Out on the street, right? You catch a glimpse, recognition sears through you, but no, it couldn't have been, must have been mistaken - yet I was right. I saw you. Sitting on a low wall, an unlit cigarette hung between two outstretched fingers; your eyes trained on me as if looking at a familiar cyclone. I mean, most people's eyes were on me. I'm a cripple, for God's sake. But you - I shouldn't have dismissed you. Not the first time and definitely not the second.

And it's all in slow motion now, because I just about remember taking that pill bottle absently out of my pocket, flicking it open, dropping three into my hands and arcing them down my throat, almost dramatically - as if I was expecting an audience.

Which I got. Because you were there, slowly burning away into torrents of toxic smoke, which tracked against my footsteps and followed me back into the hospital; heat flaring in your paces, right in sync with mine. And yet you think you're just, so, unpredictable.

You're...partly wrong.


Sitting in my office, watching my fellows' lips move but the sound drowned out; can't concentrate, something in my mind telling me I have to run - oh, the irony - so I cycle their syllables in my head until they register. An interesting case, and I use the word sparingly. Diagnose an irrelevant condition, prescribe treatment with an irrelevant name, and lean back in my chair, blanking the non-irrelevant voices inside my head.

Was that the point? Well? Might as well tell me, now it's all set in stone and I'm screaming along the highway towards you. Was that when the plan had started to unfold, hatred bordering on psychosis as heavy and brightening as a drug, that maddened little smile forming when the part of you yelling rationality finally gave up and died? Did you glance through the glass door at him, with the tangled IVs and the daughter curled up in the chair next to him, eyes wide open and staring? No, I won't pretend I cared, but at least I knew.

Did you see his face, or did you look away? Yes, it's important. It always is.


A few hours after the treatment started, we had a fairly abrupt warning that we may have misdiagnosed when blood started spurting out of his tear ducts. Or maybe it was from his fingernail beds, or his gums, or perhaps it just stayed in his veins and instead his arm muscles spasmed so hard they ripped apart, or he had a silent stroke, or anything, or everything.

Whatever it was, I doubt you care, and that's where we differ. And, of course, on the tiny little sliver of separation in how I popped a pill and you killed a man. Your moral high ground has sunk into a crater. Are those flames flickering at the base?

Are you scared?


The note. The notenotenotenotenote. Taped innoculously to my computer monitor; scrawled handwriting, no beginning and no signoff. You know, that could be construed as rude. I might mention it at our next encounter, which judging by the blurring-past road signs, is not far off. I'm breaking the speed limit, of course. If a cop stops me I'll give them your number.

I spotted it instantly, of course - when your life's concentrated between four walls, anything different is surprisingly noticeable - but I pretended I hadn't. Gave me time. Time to think, time to reason, time to question. Life's great joys, most of the time. But nothing could have quite prepared me for the words on that page

"Leave the pill bottle on the desk and walk away. You have two remaining."

Two what? Pills? No, I have three. (Yes, I memorised. I'm an addict. Is admitting it some kind of redemption? Apparently, in your eyes.) I swiped the last of the pills, left the empty bottle behind in mere curiosity, then lifted the spare bottle out of the blue vase in the diagnostics office and cheerfully went on my way. Perhaps I was even whistling a tune.

Part of me would like to believe you'd had CCTV trained on the place, but I think we're on the kind of terms now where we know what each other are thinking. Almost, even, friends. Can I call you a friend? After all, I'm so looking forward to our encounter, since it's been so long. Yet not quite long enough, since I know full well you were outside in the corridor, watching me, watching my every move, knowing I'd be too stubborn to follow instructions and too hopelessly complacent to bother turning around and solve my own mystery.

Very metaphorical of you. I'm almost proud.


Around fifteen minutes later, just around the time where you were leaning up against the toilet wall and frantically scribbling another note, I was in a clinic room, door locked, shutters down. Lockdown. I don't do that for just anything. A note, in vaguely familiar handwriting. I'd glimpsed it, once, perhaps even twice, but only a passing glance, and at the time it was irrelevant. Yet I did, and fuzzy pictures were floating in front of my eyes, desperately trying to sharpen focus. Have you ever had that? Trying to make it all make sense, but what you need's just out of reach? Like answers? Like salvation? Like me?

(You need me. Without me, you're just a killer.)


The second note was somehow more of a surprise than the first. Few of my eventualities had accounted for a second. Yet, I came back to it taped again to the computer monitor (scribbled on toilet paper. Resourceful, aren't we?) and the bottle torn haphazardly into orange plastic shards. The label, however, had been perfectly lifted off, preserved and fastened to the desk. VICODIN, 500MG. I suppose the capital letters illustrated your point well. Metaphors are fun, aren't they?

"Get rid of all your spare Vicodin into the trash can in the left corner. You have one remaining."

I have to hand it to you, I was strangely curious. So I threw in the spare stash inside the hollow chair leg, and under the plaque. But not the bag under the plant-pot in the balcony outside. That's my emergency-emergency-emergency stash. (Fabricated eventuality; I'm outside on the balcony, the hospital goes into lockdown and my arms and legs spontaneously fall off so I can't knock on the door.)

If I looked there now, I'd find a very distinct fingerprint in the dirt on the clay of the plant-pot. Arches, whirls, loops immortalised in the dust. Your way of telling me the answer, if I was in any way willing to change enough to accept it. But I didn't, because I'm an addict. I am a man addicted to painkillers for reasons that go beyond pain and am unwilling to change that or anything else that may indirectly change that fact.

Wow, I barely even noticed how much better and less hopeless the world's become, on account of me making that confession.

Oh, wait...


Do you often get people screaming in your ears? Flashing pages, talking fellows, the cacophony of light and noise that surrounds me in every minute of every day is enough to drive you mad, at least at first. But you get used to it. You acclimatise, and soon, it's the absence of the madness and the rush that comes as the shock.

After that second note, I went out onto the rooftop to think, and there was thirty minutes of complete, abject, blissful silence. Not the sound of a phone ringing, or a faint car alarm in the world beneath my feet. Not even a breeze breathing gently in my ears. Silence. Time stopped. The Earth was still.

That's when the fear set in. Paralysing fear. Silence means endings. Silence means lost to the wind and never coming back.

In your case, silence meant calmly walking into my patient's room, glancing at his eyes (awake, I'd venture, but unable to speak or move due to the elaborate series of tubes we'd chained him into) and taking out a needle. Pulling out the plunger an almost imperceptible amount, bringing in about enough air to fill a pinhead-sized container. Bringing it to the light. Maybe you watched him as you did it; his changing expression, from curiosity to mild fear to TERROR to over. I capitalised 'Terror' because that was likely most prevalent, as you plunged the needle into his vein and pressed down that irrelevant millimetre on the syringe.

Drama and convention would tell you that when you kill a man, it happens immediately. He coughs, he clutches desperately at the gaping wound in his chest, he lets out a long, low moan and freezes in time with the last expression on his face - shock and longing. Thirty seconds, a minute at the most. But what you've discovered is that it can be long and drawn-out and messy and extremely unsightly. I know that you know, because I know you watched. Nobody walks away after killing a man. My father didn't, even though Uncle Sam smiled on his murders. You had far less excuse.

Here's how I think it went: (Correct me if my choreography's off or the emotions are a little outside your vision - this is your scene, your colours and characters, and a front-row seat your greatest accolade.)

Andien Polyi lay there, silent and confused, looking at the pinprick in his arm with any emotion ranging from annoyance to mild interest. At this point, his cognitive function would have been normal, or as normal as someone with Morvan's Syndrome as a paraneoplastic complication of renal cell carcinoma could have been; after all, he hadn't slept in three days. Hopefully his brain was just not-fried enough to register two thoughts; 'hey, this hurts' and 'who the hell's that guy over there?' He'd have glanced up, met your eyes, knitted his eyebrows together in a 'what was that for?' universal gesture. You might have smiled, or kept frozen and still, watching, waiting. Perhaps you were unconsciously making the same pose I do when I'm mulling over how to save a patient - weight slightly on one leg, forehead pressed against the glass.

(Yet you had nothing to mull, except perhaps the meaning of life and the inevitability of mortality. I hope this served as a good intellectual exercise for you.)

Before your eyes, his pupils widen a tiny amount and the heart monitor's numbers creep up one, then two, then five and begin to spiral. The corner of his mouth begins to droop downwards of its own accord, being tugged by his spasming muscles, and he notices through the reflection in the glass and tries to bring his hand to his face but his arm stops a few centimetres off the bed and struggles to stay up. At this point, Andien (if you want, I could call him Experiment #1 or The Observation or something similarly detached, you FUCKING BASTARD - oh, sorry, was that rude?)

Have you ever heard the stroke acronym off the adverts? FAST. Face, arms, speech, time. (Wow, I feel so smart. Almost like I'm a real life doctor!) So at this moment, even though it's implausible due to the fact that he had a rather sizeable tube inserted into his throat at the time, I'd like to believe he tried to say something to you. Perhaps a "What have you done?" or "What's happening to me?" Maybe, just maybe, a "You've killed me!" for dramatic effect. Yes, killed. Not culled, not terminated, not erased from existence - killedmurderedmadedie. I know you. You're rationalising. You're trying to convince yourself that no, I'm not a murderer, I haven't done anything wrong, the means are to a good end. But here's the delicious part; whatever end happens, you are still a murderer, and Andrew Polyi is still in a body bag. Wait, was that his name? Andrei. Andia. That's the beauty of it! It doesn't matter anymore! He's DEAD!

Now we come to 'time', and oh, sorry, you've only paid for maximum ten minutes of airtime, so we're going to have to bring this heartbreaking little play to an end. See, that beautifully formed little bubble you injected into his veins (it's amazing what you can gauge from a quick internet search when you're out of your mind, isn't it? Hope you erased your history) has made a lovely little voyage around his bloodstream, though rather too quick for its liking. If it had been the one in charge, it would have camped out for a few days near the liver, done some watersports through the colon, sunbathed near the surface of the skin, paid homage to his screwed-up kidneys, really seen the sights, y'know? Yet, as does time and the car I'm sitting in, blood speeds callously on, until the bubble discovers that wait, I really should've gone on Atkins before this holiday, because this cerebral artery is looking a particularly tight squeeze and oh, damn it, I'm stuck. Wow, that's an impressive blood buildup there. Guess I've caused a bit of a ruckus here. What an inconvenience.

Meanwhile, the brain cells blocked off by this air embolus (sorry if you were getting really into the Story of the Pretty Bubble's Holiday, but life sucks and you're a fucking murderer) are slowly becoming more and more starved of oxygen, whilst the blood ferociously tries to beat through the bubble but it's just sitting there obliviously. And, as Andien Polyi stares ahead in shock, the brain cells begin to die. One by irrelevant one, but as a group it becomes surprisingly relevant. Nobody around to call a code, of course, except you, and you're too busy enjoying your perfectly choreographed spectacle. His brain is dying as he looks on, along with everything he's ever loved or hated or thought passable or glanced at and every memory of his daughter and his family and every idle conversation with an acquaintance he's ever had about the meaning of life and is the universe infinite and which colour of olive is best because I prefer the black ones and that algebra test he still remembers from when he was nine because he was so nervous he didn't sleep and yet he still managed a 98 and beauty and emotion and the mundane and light and colour and noise and black and whether he's scared of dying and whether it matters and everything's flying past exactly this fast so I'm awfully sorry if you can't keep track because this man's lived 37 years in this crazy fucked-up world that has me and you in it and would be better off without the both of us and his mind has built up so much and is watching it all crumble because of a bubble and a syringe and the man outside and that I popped a pill and didn't read a note and that I was born and that humanity existed and therefore so did mistakes -

He forces as many memories as possible to fly past his eyes, before his breaths still and he falls backwards onto his pillow. (I'm assuming he's seized up from the shock.) He in no way looks peaceful; his eyes are open and wide; and you let your eyelids blink once, as if a camera shutter to let the image keep, to spur you on to greater things. And you leave, knowing it'll be at least thirty seconds before the same image stains someone else's eyes.

Was I close? I hope I was close.

I hope you die inside.


They think it's me, of course. My patient, my medication. Must have screwed up somehow. Must have. Maybe it was those pesky pills, clouding his judgement. Hasn't it all worked out perfectly for you?

Clearly not, because I'm hurtling along the interstate at a hundred miles an hour to where I know in my heart you'll be. Because Andien Polyi (I read his name off a file before I got in my car, because now it matters) didn't die for the hell of it, he died to send me a message. I got it, thanks. Another note might be more desirable next time, but you knew (rightly) that no amount of notes sent would force me to read them.

Now I'm going to come and get my answers, and I will use whatever methods I have to. I'm surprisingly resourceful at times. For instance, I have three bottles of Vicodin sewed into the lining of my pockets because I know when I enter the room you're in, I'm not going to be leaving until this is done or one of us is dead.

I'm coming for you, Michael Tritter.

Your move.