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They couldn’t have known how suffocating it would be for me. To have my hands bound. Cuffed to a table for hours on end, just talking talking talking.
When? Who? How? Why?
Each new question more tedious than the last. A winning strategy.
There was even a pen and paper within arms reach. But my arms wouldn’t stretch that far in shackles and it felt inappropriate to sit and doodle anyway. So I plucked at my cuticles, digging past the edges and into living skin. I felt none of it.
When I was little and I couldn’t sleep, as was often the case, my mother used to tell me to imagine a blank piece of paper. Just to clear my simple mind, of all the petulant things that trouble children. To imagine that crisp, white piece of unmarked paper and let everything else fade away.
“And a pencil too?”
“No sweetie, just the paper. Don’t think of anything but the blank page.” she would tell me.
But once I imagined it, the pencil wouldn’t go away. My mom was so happy to have found a trick that worked. I remember her telling my grandmother about it two Christmases in a row. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was the pencil that changed everything. I let that pencil, a bright yellow Ticonderoga with a mind of its own, fill the blank page, come what may. I would imagine happy landscapes and dark caricatures, and I would sleep deeply.
I don’t remember when I stopped, if I ever did. My imaginings were usually lost by morning, as elusive as the dreams they birthed.
It could be why sitting in front of that blank piece of paper felt so familiar. And so paralyzing.
They wanted me to fill the page as badly as I wanted to comply, with different ideas on the content, I imagine. When I spoke, I sent my words my to them but my eyes never left that paper, and it stayed blank for a long time.
More tedious questions, more pathetic admissions, falling out of my mouth heavy like vomit.
I could feel my eyes wanting to close when the pencil appeared, like it always did. And like it always would, it started to draw.
It started with his knees, no surprise. I almost never started a project from a logical point of reference. Bent as though he were lain on his side, and pressed together. I moved down and sketched his full calves and feet in my mind’s eye, fixating on the fine muscles and scars earned from years of violent soccer training. I moved up his thighs and only then did my palms begin to sweat, my body remembering the way his skin felt in my damp and nervous hands. Only Warren, even just the thought of him, could provoke a physical reaction from me that a police interrogation could not.
I cheated a little and imagined the graphite lines of his bare hips, obscured by the thick down comforter in his dorm. I was moving along quickly, too eager to produce the shape of his flaccid dick, laying shyly in the crease of his thigh. His stomach was soft below his ribs, but his chest was bony like a bird’s when lying down. The reference and the sketch split at his shoulders. I decided to mind-sketch his arms open, embracing. I don’t remember his body ever suggesting a warm invitation that night. I only remember needs and demands. Panic and frenzy.
His hair inconsiderately hid his eyes, but he was smiling at me. And that was true. He had smiled at me then, and I did my best to burn the memory into the paper, though the table and down into the skin of my lap. I never wanted to forget that smile. It was empty of every bit of the mania he was known for. It was a naked and honest smile from Warren.
A burly hand, knuckles thick with black hair, abruptly pushed the paper forward. I jumped in my seat.
“Okay Spencer, just do your best to get everything you said on the page and that’ll be your official statement.”
The page was blank again and I didn’t sleep peacefully for a long time.