The Detective's Garden. Janyce Stefan-Cole
her cash. Why didn’t they snap? Why only pockets of snappers and not the other way round? For all the years Emil had been a criminal investigator the question never left him: why the citizenry was mostly docile.
His shirt, which was loose, felt close. The heat nagged, forced its way up to his verbal brain so he had to fight from stating the obvious, from declaring out loud, “Jesus, it’s hot!” He’d have to get the sprinkler going. He preferred to hand-water; it took forever but what kind of hurry was he in? Besides, hand-watering showed up problems: eaters, wilts, a million fungi looking to have their way. A heat wave, like a plague, requires vigilance. Emil was calm as he thought of watering and droughts, heat and smog.
For now his thoughts steered nicely clear of the day before, of having fired the two rounds into the pepper patch. He’d thought in the night that the shots could have attracted attention—locking the stable door after the horse is out—but nothing had come of it so far, and twenty-four hours had now gone by. His cleaning the revolver was good training; a cop’s automatic response to having fired his weapon. That he had no business discharging the weapon in the first place was not yet a sore he was ready to rub. Worse, he did not know why he fired. Had he intended, for even a flicker of a second, to shoot his neighbor?
Emil sometimes imagined what his former partner, Detective John Michael Dunn, might have to say. They’d spent enough time sharing crime scenes and car-seat lunches, had talked over plenty. Mike might say Emil was shooting at God.
God was in the dirt, was he, Mike?
Not precisely. But the God who made your wife sick deserved a bullet, right?
So I was mad at God, shot the dirt instead? That’s the idea?
Grief’s not a tidy package, Milosec, much as you might like it to be.
“Neither is your God,” Emil said aloud to the empty garden.
But a temporary calm disallowed any real analysis. Instead, Emil behaved like a dazed man who has just walked away from a car crash, ignorant for the time being and numb as to what has befallen him, of his reasons for having fired two bullets into his garden on a Brooklyn morning in June 1995—two years after the death of his lovely wife.
He crossed his legs, picked up what was left of the now rock-hard toast, smeared jam on it, and moved on to the Science pages. The impossible certainty of the scientists amused him. Let them explain the criminal mind. What, genetics, upbringing? Given time, would science get to the bottom of the whole loving show? Birth to death, and all the issues in between?
Lately he’d been wading into articles on the universe. There was the idea of nothingness and possibility: the cosmological constant energy and its opposite twin, dark matter, in an expanding universe—if that made any sense. Some of it knotted his brain. Like the theory of the shrinking universe. But where did that leave the expanding one? He figured it couldn’t do both. He didn’t mind the idea of nothingness as much as he minded searching for false comfort. Nothingness, according to Emil, was preferable to a fabricated faith filling in the void, a distraction papered with promises of heaven and hell. Chaos made more sense; laws of physics and this and that randomly coming to be. When he read about things like string theory, he pictured the cat’s cradle game his sister used to play on his outstretched fingers.
The headline of today’s Science section read, “Beginning a Bargain Basement Invasion of Mars.” Emil raised his head, looked out onto his glorious garden, and smiled
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