Ah, the fat woman again.
I waited patiently for the corrections officers to handcuff me to the cold metal chair—first the wrists, and then the ankles, all of which were already locked in cuffs of their own—and considered the conversation we would have today.
"Miss Batista, what makes you do these things? You know you'll be stuck in prison forever if you don't stop killing in here."
Am I to understand, Mrs. Umplett, that you would instead have me kill out there?
"You can stop anytime you want to. You have power over your life."
Oh, I know.
The security door groaned and she shuffled in, bracelets jingling on her thick white arms like bells around calves' necks. Her watery hazel eyes, sunken into the flesh of her rouged face, were like pig's eyes as she smiled for the officers and sat down across from me. They were fairly intelligent eyes, and ruthless, but any power she might have had was buried beneath mountains of self-doubt. She sighed a little sigh I'm certain she thinks is endearing and opened her portfolio-briefcase, which smelled of Italian leather.
"This will be recorded. Hello, Alessandra." Her tongue darted out like an eel from its red-lipped cave to lick at a finger and thumb. I believe she quit smoking cigarettes some time ago, but not soon enough to prevent the telltale vertical wrinkles above and below her mouth, which she attempts each morning to conceal with foundation and powder. She began to make a great show of shuffling her papers around, and I watched her mind working, preparing her speech.
"Hello, Maya," I replied politely from my steel chair.
She stopped shuffling after a few moments and clasped her small, pudgy hands over the stack. Really, they were dainty hands, but they ended in inch-long acrylic nails in ruby-red, a fashion which I have always found somewhat grotesque. Mrs. Umplett, ever the brilliant psychologist, noticed my attentions.
"I got them done yesterday. You don't like them?"
"They're very unattractive," I answered. "Did you know that long nails are symbolic of wealth and power? A man or woman with long nails does no manual labor for him or herself. The idleness of the aristocrat."
She showed her teeth to me and her eyes were momentarily lost in the folds of her enormous face, but I knew I had offended her. She was so terribly insecure. "I always learn something new from you, Alessandra. You know, it surprises me..." She flipped through her reports until she found what she was looking for. "It surprises me," she continued, "that with an IQ like yours, you're wasting away in jail. You broke the curve in almost every test you've taken. You could be doing so many great things." And fixing me with a sad little gaze, she waited for me to make my response. I could smell her breath even though she was breathing through her nose. Her lungs worked very hard for her.
"Well," I said, trying not to inhale when she exhaled, "I'm not here for my own amusement." It was true. I always tell the truth.
She sighed again. "Miss Batista, you're not mentally ill, and you're not stupid. You have the power to improve, to set your life straight. You have the power to be healed. Why do you continue to sabotage yourself?"
"You're referring to yesterday's incident. Kimberly Long." The dead woman, the so-called femme.
"Yes, yes I am. Can you talk to me about that?"
"Of course. She and her friends have attacked me on several occasions out of jealousy. They claim their 'studs' find me desirable. They call me 'Angelface.'"
"It's not easy to be as beautiful as you are in an all-female prison," Mrs. Umplett intoned sagely. She had a rather annoying habit of stating the blatantly obvious as though it were a kernel of wisdom. Along with her sighing and her vanity, it made her nearly unbearable at times.
"Mrs. Umplett, have you ever read Ender's Game?" Of course, she hadn't. She would have misguidedly dismissed it as a children's book.
"No… I can't say that I have."
"A decisive action is the only reliable way to prevent a group from becoming out of control. I don't have the resources or the physical strength to take on a gang, and if I hadn't done something, they would inevitably have come together to kill me. It was not enough to kill their leader; it was necessary to make a statement."
"You beat Ms. Long with a broken broomstick and then forcibly inserted it into her vagina… She bled to death."
"While such an unorthodox method of execution might be disturbing enough to distract you," I calmly pointed out, "its message was not lost on my cellmates."
She was silent for a while, then. I waited for her to sigh, and she did not fail me. Finally, she knitted her drawn-on eyebrows together and prepared to speak. According to the Chinese, thin eyebrows have always been a woman's way of expressing her agreeable and submissive personality, today a subconscious attempt at gentle feminine desirability. I am weak and harmless; therefore I am desirable as a mate. I'm sure the great psychologist was unaware of just how much personal information she emitted. She was like a floodlight. "Why do you feel the need to solve problems through violence, Alessandra? I need you to help me understand, so I can help you."
Now I was beginning to become annoyed. "Do you speak as though you're a simpleton because you think it will relax my guard or because you think I enjoy feeling intellectually superior to others?"
She tilted her head to one side as though she hadn't heard me properly. "I don't know what you mean."
"No, you do, but you want me to spell it out for you. You coat your words in honey and ask me child's questions, but you're intelligent enough to know that you may be direct with me—more so than with anyone else, I think. I'm not your husband; you shouldn't feel the need to tiptoe and hint and wheedle and make yourself seem attractive in order to get the things you want. Each of my four limbs is handcuffed to my chair. I'm in no position to frighten you unless you allow me to, and you have. There will be no real progress unless you correct that mistake."
I could almost hear her graduate school mantras whirling through her head. In every session, it is necessary to prevent the "power" from being in the client's hands. She would now have to either refuse to speak on the topic or draw the focus back to me by picking apart my speech and finding hidden personal demonstrations within it, such as my need to analyze others.
"You're always analyzing people," she said after collecting herself, and I privately congratulated her. "Are you afraid of unpredictability?"
"Much better," I replied with a patient smile, nodding. "I like to eliminate unknowns."
"Why?"
What a silly question. "Knowledge provides more relative safety than its lack."
"Relative safety?"
"There is no such thing as complete safety." As I said it I knew that in her later report she would call me paranoid as well as antisocial. I meet some of the criteria for membership in the DSM-IV dissocial disorder club, but I am certainly not paranoid. "Ask me a real question, Mrs. Umplett, and do it with confidence, if you please."
"All right." She seemed to find this request reasonable. "Tell me about a time when you were young and you didn't feel safe."
"I don't need a lesson in self-awareness," I said irritably. "I know very well why I am the way I am, but if you remain curious, I don't have any reservations about answering your question. My father came to Escarpa from Earth when I was 5, and then, promptly, he died, leaving my sister, my mother, and me in a foreign world. From this, you will draw the conclusion that I have internal feelings of abandonment. My mother prostituted herself and abused us, and from this, you will deduce, among other things, that I have a deeply-seated anger toward women and toward myself as a woman. My mother died of overdose and my sister and I were separated when we were turned over to foster care. Luciana was badly abused and neglected. When the law failed to punish them, I tortured and killed her entire foster family. I've been in prison for three years, and I have injured eight inmates and killed one, bringing my total murder count to five.
"Now I am here, talking to you, and I must say that while not particularly delightful, it has been quite illuminating. I feel I should give you something in return for your troubles. Shall I share my findings with you?"
She was all encouragement, the poor woman. "Gooood! That's wonderful, honey. Please tell me." Finally, she had lost her fear of me.
"I have come to understand that you, my dear therapist, are the Madonna of insecurity. You chose to pursue this profession because you thought you might find the answers to your own problems. You also enjoy the maternal feelings associated with the job—there is a sense of control, and you have always been under the control of someone else. It shows in everything you do. Your vanity, your need to be found pleasing by others, is pathetic. Do you feel useless when you aren't needed? How soon after your children moved out did you decide to finish your studies?"
"Eh-excuse me?"
"I imagine life-sentence convicts like me are especially appetizing for you. With nothing but a bimonthly visit from our families to look forward to, I'd be willing to wager that your face is a welcome sight for many, even if they refuse to admit it. Is this useful to you?"
A muscle was working in Mrs. Umplett's jaw. She cleared her throat and took a sip of water, leaving a red stain on the glass. "I think we should continue this another time. You're becoming agitated." The guards stepped forward and released me from the chair, their hands firmly clamped around my upper arms.
"It seems strange to put a stop to the session after coming to the story you were searching for," I remarked to the ceiling. Slowly, I let my eyes slip down over her face, which was rapidly becoming more and more strained. "You might have learned something today. Unfortunately, you're the sort of person who, once she has made up her mind, cannot fathom changing it. You fear the appearance of wavering, but you spend every moment of your life doing just that. You merely imagine that only you are aware of it. Have you considered therapy, Mrs. Umplett?"
I never saw her again. Some people simply cannot bear to look inward.