A response to the "When Good People Go Bad" challenge at livejournal.com/~thursday100plus, a Law and Order fiction community.
"The Language of the Unspoken" is Copyright © 2003 to Amy Lin Sampson.
Bobby Goren is fluent in the language of the unspoken, of the subtle ways the body betrays guilt and shame--the drop of a shoulder, the smoothing of a tongue over teeth--and all that can be expressed without words. It is, he thinks with no trace of bitterness, a product of living with the mentally ill.
On those rare days when she was lucid, he attempted to talk to her, but those days are fading echoes now, and his voice sounds hollow to him in this withering white room. So he leaves the syllables scattered over the years, the forgotten phrases on the floor, and he does not ask her how she is or tell her about his day. (About how all that separated him from another's blood was a light layer of latex and all that separated him from another's mind was a large frame and a mouth that can close around the word "schizophrenia.") Instead, he watches her hands, her eyes, her mouth, a far more expressive lexicon than diagnoses and dreams.
He's used to masqueraded illness, doctors with doorways to God in their delusions, but Carmel Ridge isn't anything but what it is, and that is different. There's no illusionary haze to obfuscate what is simply schizophrenia, which isn't as comforting as it ought to be, for at the office diagnosing the suspect's illness is tantamount to discovering this solution, only this isn't the office, this is there. There is where there are no solutions, only problems with names like Annabelle and Marc, and these are somehow more dead than the math equations that never drew breath.
Work has taught him how to waltz through the minds of the mad, how to spin a few strains of sanity into a symphony with a melody of motive and a harmony of human fallibility, but that's in a controlled environment where there's filtered air and walls of bland grey that keep screams from seeping out, and his sympathy is secondhand. Here at the primary source, where the air is limp with the tangy scent of sweat and antiseptic and the crazed chords of music therapy patients careen down the corridor, there is no distance. It's raw and it's real and it's immediate, and he wonders what it says about his character that the sight of unadulterated insanity still conjures images of flung books and his brother's rage, and then his own, so far delayed.
He clasps her hand as he moves to leave, and she turns her head away from him, and he knows this means she's sorry.
Often she's asleep when he visits, and he appreciates this, the same way he appreciates a suspect's unraveling, with a shadow of near-shame and regret for exploiting base (or perhaps just basic) fear and anger. But this time she's not, she's sitting up in bed, creasing sheets of copy paper, and it occurs to him that he doesn't know what to say. So he doesn't. He merely sits down beside her and watches her hands move through space like birds with broken wings, waiting for them to crash, as they must and do.
She falls back onto her pillow, her eyes meeting his, and she rasps, "I am so tired."
"I know." What he doesn't finish saying, his shoulders pulled forward, his body collapsing in on itself, does.
One of his hands covers hers, surrounds hers, shields it, as she's carried off to sleep by Lucifer or the Archangel. He knows that inside her mind there is nothing but noise, an endless, ceaseless cacophony, or worse, nothing. There may, five, ten, fifteen years from now be a new medication, but nothing is going to turn the muddy years clean again, and he remembers this when the doctors speak of another drug, another chemical compound, another perhaps--maybe--this time. As she dreams he thinks of mercy and whether it's right to keep submitting her to this when he hears her say she wishes for it to end, for the blankness to last long enough to become comforting and common again.
When he returns next week, she warns him about Delilah and then throws a plastic cup of applesauce at his forehead where it splatters, feeling not unlike blood. He knows what she's asking.
It's a simple enough plan: poison wrapped in chocolate. Not even poison, really, but an antidepressant, so that the reaction will be written up as a lab error, or an aide's mistake, the wrong pill in the wrong cup, and we're all so sorry Mr Goren and we don't know how this could have happened. The pretty redheaded aide, the young one with the capped tooth, will probably be fired, and he feels a twinge of pity, but she hasn't suffered nearly as long as her, and his guilt slips from him like a second skin.
They sit together, watching Jeopardy. He answers every question correctly, and she answers none, so full of medications and misery that she can't bring herself to speak tonight. When it's over, he rises and brushes his lips against her forehead, her skin dry.
Exiting the facility, his shield thumps against his leg inside his coat pocket, reminding him of all he's failed to put between them.
Alex Eames is fluent in the language of the unspoken, of the subtle ways to ask the hardest questions--the arch of an eyebrow, the tilt of the head--and all that can be expressed without words. It is, she thinks with no trace of bitterness, a product of living with Bobby Goren.
When he talks (briefly, in circular sentences) of his mother she knows to watch his hands, the way he sculpts the air between them, so this is what she does when she places the obituaries over the file he's perusing. She sees the motion of the pen he's tapping slow and then stop, and he looks up to her, one hand returning the paper to her and the other holding his coffee. Without words she begins to ask the question, and his answer lies in the crumpled Styrofoam in his palm and the dark liquid seeping over her shoes.