exploring humanity through fictional pain

“As the detective said,” Susan explains, “I specialize in crisis intervention, and for the last eight years, I’ve primarily worked with asylum seekers and refugees of conflicts abroad. I’ve talked to a lot of people who, like you, have experienced some pretty extreme traumatic events.”

Detective Reed clears his throat. “Given the, uh, the circumstances, we found it best to include someone with experience on the subject. It’s entirely understandable that you… well, that it’s difficult to talk about what happened. The nurses informed us you’ve been… So with that in mind, the broader interviews we’d like to do with you for the sake of the investigation on our side aren’t very time sensitive. At this point in time, the only goal Susan and I have is to give you an opportunity to ask about the police investigation and events surrounding your case. From our understanding, you’ve had very limited interactions with the outside world, isn’t that right?”

Without looking, Conrad runs his fingers over the velcro straps on the sling that secures his hand snug to his abdomen.

It’s early noon on day three, and he still hasn’t spoken out loud. Most waking hours he spends curled up in a white faux-leather armchair intended for visitors, not because he prefers it to lying down, but because it’s closer to the window than the hospital bed. Here is a vantage point to both the main entrance and a dozen smaller doors. It’s too far to distinguish faces, but close enough to make out distinctive silhouettes. When he’s not biting his nails in a rush of vigilance, the lookout spot provides an adequate alternative to a TV better left off.

On the day of his arrival, although he was hypothermic and confused, they risked partial anesthesia to clear out splinters and burnt tissue, restore blood flow, and salvage what they could in his hand. They didn’t technically put him under, but whatever they administered still had him sleeping within minutes. Mercifully, they let him sleep until he woke up on his own - eighteen hours later, at the dawn of his first full day of freedom.

It started then, his self-imposed mutism. Mostly, it was because of the drugs. His thoughts were so scrambled, he wasn’t sure he could control the words coming out of his mouth, and decided none would be the safest option.

The staff were stumped at first. They thought he was catatonic. Whispered in the hallway, unsure of what to do. That evening, a nurse named Debbie informed him that his dad’s flight was scheduled to land soon, and in the same light tone of voice one might use on a young child, asked Conrad if he was looking forward to seeing him again.

In the unlikely event she expected an actual answer, she definitely couldn’t have expected a no. She actually froze in place when Conrad shook his head, and it took her a long moment before she collected herself enough to crouch by the bedside, looking up at him with concern.

“You don’t want to see him…?”

Conrad can’t remember if he was crying or not, but he does remember shaking his head again.

On the second day, the orthopedic surgeon came in to brief him, good-humored despite the entirely one-sided nature of their meeting, about further surgeries to restore the aching limb now wrapped up and splinted flat. Conrad was guided around print-out anatomy illustrations and surgical techniques, but only roughly remembers a plan centered around an artificial bone - which is apparently possible - nerve grafts, and the reconnection of tendons. His disposition then was one of dazed nonresistance, and that hasn’t changed at subsequent mentions of a physiotherapy regiment, or when a different surgeon, in a different one-sided consultation, brainstormed different interventions to treat the damage in his leg. Other specialists have since floated possibilities from the broad world of scar care, massage appointments, prescription salves, laser treatment, and cosmetic surgery. More generally, they fuss about the fluid in his lungs, about his blood count, his diet, how much he sleeps, drinks, lies down, sits, urinates; about the timing of the pills they have him swallow when they can’t take a convenient shortcut through the IV in his good hand; about how many painful steps they can convince him to take with the aid of a nurse and a crutch.

Without exception, they all pretend not to notice how Conrad tenses up whenever someone enters the room, or shudders at the touch of gloved hands. They rarely skip a beat when they discover a fresh scar or wound they haven’t seen before. They’ve learned not to. And while being one degree removed from genuine human contact is a godsend some moments, the high-brow courtesy and platitudes make him sick in others. Sometimes he needs their empathy in the exact moment they make it contingent. Sometimes he needs them to be shocked, to validate that everything is, in fact, insane.

And sometimes, when they do try to get closer, he feels like a porcupine with its spikes raised. He can’t get rid of that feeling no matter how many times he internally forces himself to admit that it’s not their fault if they get it wrong, that they can’t read his mind.

Susan is a middle-aged, scholarly-looking woman. She looks uncomfortable on the hard plastic chair she brought in from the hallway, but simultaneously refuses to admit this in front of her patient, resulting in the stiff, ever-so-crooked posture she’s been holding since she sat down - though, maybe the thick knitted cardigan takes the brunt of the hardness on her back. She wears these square-toed black-lacquered shoes, one of which she keeps raised by crossed legs to sway in the air, as if carefully demonstrating her nonchalance.

“Before we get too deep into it,” she says mildly, “I do want you to know that stopping this conversation at any time is completely fine. You don’t have to explain yourself, and we don’t expect you to. We’re just here to provide whatever clarity we can, alright? Do you think you can nod or shake your head in response to questions?”

Conrad nods at his lap. He’s done that before - Susan was probably told.

“Is it okay that we’re here talking to you?”

He swallows.

Of course there’s more to his mutism than all the things the journalists circling the parking lot or holed up in the main foyer have been told. More still than what Reed himself has kept undisclosed.

Conrad grew more accustomed to the haze of the painkillers over the first day. He figured he could extend his silence to buy some time, get the story straight. But as the last couple days have gone by, that logic has gotten harder to justify. It’s not that complicated.

He’s still not speaking.

Outside, the two orange vests have found themselves converging in the middle of the grassy area. One gestures at the other, and attempts to stick his shovel straight down into the frozen dirt; it doesn’t penetrate, so instead he balances it upright with both hands folded on the handle. The other vest takes a break from shoveling, too. Dim breaths of steam rise from a casual chat between coworkers. The symptom of an entirely unrelated world continuing to turn despite the crumbling of Conrad’s.

There’s so much he could mention.

He is traumatized. He is hurting. After a full week spent imagining his own dead body in a shallow grave, there’s a very real whiplash to being faced with survival - and a real spike in his relief whenever he’s faced with the scope of recovery, or the fact that he’s disabled and disfigured now, that some of this pain probably won’t ever go away.

If he’s being honest, he’s terrified of having to leave the hospital and go back into a life built for the person he used to be. He’s terrified that maybe some viewers of the streams will want to carry on the torch, or they’ll have some warped idea of vengeance. So many people can recognize his face in a crowd now, and he’ll have no clue of their intentions.

And three people are dead, god. Three people are dead, but somehow Conrad is not.

Renee is dead, and one of the first things out of Conrad’s mouth has to be a lie about how and why that happened.

It shouldn’t be hard. He already made this lie on the 911 call. He just has to repeat it.

“Maybe you feel ambivalent?” Susan asks. “That’s okay. I’ll keep the detective on his best behavior, don’t you worry. Just try to let us know if you need to rest.”

Conrad bites his lip. He nods.

It shouldn’t be hard, but once the first lie has been told, others will need to follow. Restraints of his own design, as it were, which he’ll have to live in for the rest of his life.

Renee drove the van that night. Renee kept him fed, patched up his wounds, and gave him painkillers. Renee was the one who caught him in the woods, sank a scalpel so deep into his flesh that half the handle disappeared, and then gave him a choice. Maybe traces of diazepam are still detectable during the autopsy - Conrad has no idea how long that stuff can stay in someone’s system - so, well, Renee decided to take it. Conrad just has to forget the morning after the overdose, and the panicked, teary look in the man’s eyes when he realized what Davin had done.

For all every body else knows, that’s where Conrad should lay the blame. But with fresh memories of a man trembling with guilt, clinging to his last hopes that he didn’t just cause someone’s death, and weakly begging for the life of his victim to be spared - with the image burning in his mind of Davin shooting him point-blank in the head, and the blood, and the last gasps of life, and the blind eyes - Conrad has to pretend it never happened, that he didn’t see, and he has to do it with unwavering conviction. He has to wipe a murder victim’s last grasp for redemption from the record before he has a chance to process how he himself should even feel about it.

Cameras or not, the show is still going, and the audience is still there. It’s just the burden of performing that has been shifted.

Pressing the root of his hand between his eyes, he turns his face away from his interviewers.

Reed clears his throat. He talks about the events of that day, filling in the gaps of a timeline Conrad has only gleaned half of. The informant - a man by the name of Lazarus - left one among at least a hundred tips of the prior week, but his own history gave his claim more weight than others. He volunteered for the sting before his appointed lawyer could even lay the groundwork for proper negotiations - in theory, had the police been a tad stricter about standard procedures, they could’ve ended that day arresting Renee and Lazarus both.

The detective’s voice is flat, procedural, and framed mostly in passive language. Even if Conrad never met Lazarus, it feels dehumanizing to hear him described as “the informant” in an account of how he died. That tone shifts into something warmer when Reed describes the death of the officer. Whether she knew or not, she’d broken protocol by pursuing Renee alone, but her motivation - to prevent Renee’s escape as a means to save Conrad’s life - is something Reed names explicitly.

Regardless of Reed’s framing, what Conrad can glean between the lines makes him feel sick. Beat for beat, Renee’s actions make him think of stories he’s heard of drowning victims who pull down the lifeguards that try to help them - the worst damage imaginable done by the instinct to just stay afloat.

“And right now,” Reed continues, “we’re working on getting a clearer picture of the events that transpired throughout the whole ordeal, and the persons we know to have been involved, just to get a sense for errors in our investigation. God forbid, if something like this happens again, we want to make sure we respond to it as best we can.” Reed gives a tired smile. Lets it fade. “So… At the time of your rescue, we still didn’t know where you’d been held. We’d been trying to build up a profile of Renee Vaughan at that time, but he has a flighty history, lived in a lot of different places, so finding the people who knew him was difficult. We did manage to track down his sister, though, Stephanie. She lives in Indiana with her husband - the whole family is kind of split across the country. We finally interviewed her on the same day as your rescue, and she mentioned that her parents own property in Ohio. Coincidentally, around the same time, we received a rapport from the Cincinnati fire department about suspected arson at the same address she’d provided. That was… well, a few hours after your call.

“They still hadn’t managed to extinguish it by then. Don’t ask me how they called it - something about the ferocity of the flames, the… burn pattern, I suppose, the way it looks to have spread. There’s a reason I’m not a fire investigator. Well. I believe it ended up taking them over seven hours in total to put it out. Our forensics team is still combing through the site. I was there yesterday. I don’t think they recovered much that wasn’t steel or ash, unfortunately. But we’ve found enough evidence to know you were there.”

Reed purses his lips, and his gaze drops to the floor.

“And you should know, Conrad, that uh… Our digital forensics team is certain that everything Renee used to conduct the streams was stored locally. While we did find the remains of electronics, the fire was hot enough to melt the circuitry. There’s nothing to recover. That probably includes the… the funds, you know.” He pauses after that, clears his throat again, and in a quieter voice, he says, “If you ask me, that’s probably for the best.”

Conrad nods a little.

Most of the snow has been cleared, and the ground underneath looks jagged and uneven even from a distance. Idly, Conrad wonders if he’d be capable of traversing something like that, and how long it might take to get to that point. How many hours of physiotherapy he might have to go to; where in the world those hours will come from. The hospital crutch rests against a radiator, a reflective sticker on the end of the handle shifting against the light.

Reed clears his throat. “If it’s at all possible,” he says slowly. “I did want to ask you just a few questions about the… timing of what happened, I suppose, on the day you called us. Do you think you could tell me a bit about it?”

Conrad swallows. The muscles in his throat feel weak and stiff, and it makes his voice rusty. “You said you wouldn’t.”

There’s a half second where both Susan and Reed are still with surprise. Then a grimace flickers over Reed’s face. “I did say that, I apologize. I can’t imagine how hard it might be to relive these events. It’s just really important for us to get a clearer understanding of how everything happened.” He takes a deep breath. “We know that Renee had contact with one of the decedents, at the very least. Unfortunately, it’s not a stretch to imagine others were involved, and if that’s the case, we want to find out about that, right?”

Conrad has to sit very still to not begin shaking. “I never saw anyone else.”

Reed nods. “I understand that. But Renee did leave sometimes, didn’t he?”

Aversion or not, Conrad has to start somewhere. He stares at his lap. Feels his eyesight blur, and knows somewhere in the back of his mind that he’s retreating again, but he can’t muster up the energy to fight against it. “He… took something.” The words come out airy and robotic. “He was… afraid, I think. He put me in the car. He… put… cans, like… maybe gasoline, in the house. He lit it.”

“What do you mean by him being afraid?”

It’s not hard to imagine someone erratically pacing the house, peering suspiciously out the windows, but it’s a step removed. The highest Conrad ever saw him, Renee flickered between an almost delusional grandiosity and being violent, vengeful. Conrad licks his lips. “Talking to himself, like… whispering. Or just… paranoid.”

Reed nods slowly. “Okay. You’re doing good, Conrad, thank you. Do you remember what time this happened?”

It’s the effort required to pull rubber boots out of ankle-high mud versus the effort of just standing there and breathing. “It was light outside.”

Reed hums. “In the morning, then. And what happened then?”

“He took me… to that house.”

“The one you eventually called from? He brought you out there directly?”

Conrad nods.

“Did he say why he was taking you there?”

He shakes his head.

Reed purses his lips. “His actions that day do just strike me as a little odd. He’s paranoid about getting caught, so he burns a majority of the evidence against him - but you, he brings to a second location. Not only that, but he came back.”

Conrad swallows down dizziness. It feels like a fine line mixing reality into the tapestry he’s been forced to construct, but in the moment, the thought of wrenching Renee’s character to the point of cartoonism makes him nauseous. Nevermind how he actually feels about Renee pleading for Conrad’s life - he just can’t push himself to ignore it entirely.

Hoarsely, he says, “He didn’t want me to die.”

Reed doesn’t react, really, but his tone gets slightly flatter. “Is that something he told you?”

Scratching his arm, Conrad gives a small nod.

“Was this before or after he returned to the house? What else did he say?”

“He said… said he did something bad. He was crying.” Conrad’s voice gets smaller and smaller, and the last sentence is almost a whisper. “He said he didn’t mean to do it.”

Reed looks at him for a long time, long enough that Conrad’s heart sinks into his stomach. Eventually, he leans forward in his chair, folding his hands in front of him. “Conrad,” he says slowly, “I don’t know how Renee came across to you most of the time, or what he told you, or how he said it. And there’s no doubt in my mind that he was a deeply, deeply disturbed individual.” He pauses, brows knit as he mulls over phrasing. “But… I think it’s important for you to recognize that at every step of the way, this man showed a level of… forethought, you know, deliberateness - that simply doesn’t line up with that degree of… I don’t know what to call it - lack of awareness, I suppose. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

Conrad doesn’t move.

“He knew what he was doing. He knew the consequences of his actions so well, he took meticulous steps to avoid them. That’s simply not something you see from mentally unstable suspects. On the contrary, what you do see is… See, in my experience, there’s a common misconception in criminal suspects - in the general public, really - that in a court of law, being deemed not guilty for reason of insanity leads to, well… a lot of people think you walk free, more or less. That’s not how the legal system works at all. In this case it would’ve led to the same basic outcome, but with more psychologists involved.” Reed snorts humorlessly. “It’s not true, but the myth is still prevalent. If I had to guess, Renee put on a facade once the net started to tighten around him. Maybe some of it was genuine, but it’s highly unlikely everything was.”

Conrad opens his mouth, but he can’t think of anything to say. Instead he sits there, blinking, for a little too long.

There’s serious alarm on Reed’s face now. Exasperated, he readjusts in his seat, visibly restraining his gestures. “Renee Vaughan repeatedly did serious harm to you, and he knew it was harmful when he did it. He then murdered two people to avoid capture. You understand that, right?”

Conrad is about to croak out an answer when Susan clears her throat.

The detective stills, gaze snapping to her, as though he forgot she even existed, and Conrad doesn’t blame him; she hasn’t said a word since she introduced herself.

“Mr. Reed, do you have any more questions for the investigation?”

As if catching himself, Reed drags in a breath, forcing himself into a more casual posture. “Ah, I think, maybe we’ve gone over enough for today…”

She smiles politely. “Would you mind if I spoke to Conrad one-on-one for a bit?”

“Not at all, I’ll, uh…” He gets to his feet. “I apologize if… I didn’t mean to come across as harsh, Conrad. I know I don’t have the full side of the story. You can talk to me about it once it’s not so fresh, does that sound alright? You just take all the time you need to get back on your feet.”

With a professional nod at Susan, Reed lets himself out. He forgets to wait until the door is all the way closed behind him before muttering to somebody in the hallway. Conrad can’t make out words, but he sees the man shake his bowed head.

Wincing, he bites down on his nail.