The Confession

Is it fiction?

The Confession

Extreme torment was apparent on every feature of the big man’s face, as he shifted about uncomfortably in my patient’s chair. His whole body quivered if he stopped shifting for even a moment. His was the worst case of emotional unrest I’d ever seen on the outside of a strait jacket. And it seemed there could be no doubt, that was where this one belonged. I remember thinking how the close knit of his khaki vest looked a little like one...but I'm fairly new at this, I was little more than half my patient’s age, this balding, wild-eyed sixty-something, and I wasn’t sure how to break it to him that I didn’t think I could help him. I know now I should have just placed a call...‘but wait,’ I'd thought, ‘surely I should at least listen.’ I thought surely I should be able to restrain him physically myself, if need be.

In hindsight, I regret everything about that session, every decision I made and every warning sign I chose to overlook. But his death is the cause of only part of my regret.

“You’ve gotta help me get this thing out of my head!” he cried hoarsely, gesturing briskly with both hands while barely separated from the floor by the fore edge of the chair. “I can’t think! I can’t function! It’s drivin’ me totally stark starin’ crazy!”

I had to be sure it wasn’t some physiological issue he'd brought to a psychiatrist's office. So I ventured, “Are you in any kind of physical pain?” Immediately he stood up, shuddered and snorted all at the same time, an astonishing effect.

“Pain! I wish it was only pain! I'd rather it be anything at all instead of that...laugh! Anything!” Standing then in front of me, he was large enough that I felt compelled to stand up to face him. “You can give me something? Can't you? Kill it! Kill this...thing!”

That should have been the point at which I relented and called for assistance. I'll never know why I didn't.

“Please,” I urged, “Please settle down, just a bit. Please, be seated. Collect yourself well enough to tell me what’s upsetting you.” The man's body said ‘okay, I'll comply’ but his widened eyes were telling me it wouldn’t last long. I placed a comforting hand on his shoulder as he parked himself again on the very edge of the plush chair, and his voice quavered as he wrung his hands together, and his quivering advanced to a visible shake.

“That laugh! That horrible, creepy, disgusting laugh! I should have killed him when we were teenagers…”

The suggestion of homicide shouldn’t have been a surprise, but at least he was saying he hadn’t committed one. My curiosity had been piqued.

“Let’s just start at the beginning. You do have to realize, I don’t know anything about this. Start, and give me something to understand.” I thought I must have been right to calm him and to coax him to speak, because he seemed to settle, re-positioned himself into the chair and even leaned back.

“It all started,” he began, “when Fleming came to our school district. I was in the eighth grade. You knew something was wrong, you just knew it, just by looking at him. His head was too big for his scrawny body, and it was misshapen, like a lopsided egg. His eyes were too close together and his chin receded. And you’ve never seen teeth like his.”

My patient leaned forward again, and I thought his previous mood was about to return. Indeed, his voice began to rise, his agitation more apparent with each word.

“And lots of people look different, we all could’ve handled that! It was his voice! It was his attitude, both of them a perfect framework for that...horrible, evil laugh!”

I leaned forward myself, interested, but remained silent. He continued.

“It wasn’t just me! Nobody could stand it! There’s no way to describe something like that! You can’t imagine a laugh that has a clicking sound to it, that chatters like monkeys, that abrades you and rubs you raw when it hits you! And if it comes again, you’ve gotta leave! You’ve gotta get away from it! I swear, it could kill! And, I know, you think it’s just ‘cause I’m crazy! I’m there, but that’s not why! Nobody could stand it, the kid used to get detention for laughing. He got sent to the office for it!”

My patient wiped his forehead with the back of a hand. “I admit, there was a triggering event that put it beyond what I could stand. It was a school bus accident.”

As if reading my mind, my patient looked at me and shook his head in the negative. “He didn’t cause it. And there were no kids on the bus, it was just turning from the highway into the school’s driveway to pick up students, and it got hit by a tractor-trailer. The driver of the truck was half- asleep, they said. But the bus driver didn’t make it. He was an older guy, probably as old as I am now, and he was killed on the spot. Of course, before the police got there, the accident had attracted a crowd of curious teenagers.”

His earlier visage of extreme torment returned, just before he buried his face in his hands and continued, voice cracking. “The cops came and pushed everyone back. After a few minutes more the paramedics arrived, realized the bus driver was gone and then the police helped to extract the body from the wreckage. And before they’d had a chance to cover the body, Fleming went running up to it and started...dancing! Ohh, and he cut loose with that laugh, that horrible, evil, disgusting laugh!”

I admit, even I was appalled by the mental picture he’d generated. I remained silent and listened, but began to feel sorry for this man for the first time.

“One of the cops, who’d no doubt never heard such an unearthly thing in his life, immediately lost it. I heard later that his job was on the line over it, ‘cause the kid was only fifteen. But he clocked Fleming on the beak right then and there, and then grabbed him by the collar and dragged him, bleeding and laughing, all the way up to the high school office.”

As he opened his hands to uncover his face, I could see it was tear-stained.

“After that, Fleming did get quieter. A lot quieter. And it’s a good thing. Because I think if I’d have seen anything like that ever again, I’d have killed him. And like that cop found out, anybody who’d never heard Fleming laugh would not understand.

And then, the most amazing thing happened. You would never think, changing one student could change the face of an entire school. But it did. Fleming began to fill out, and his head started to look more normal for his body. He pulled his grades out of the tank. People still avoided him, he didn’t have a single friend. But then, when he’d hit the eleventh grade, a new girl moved into our school district. And the change that came next, nobody could believe.”

He pushed his posterior further back in my patient’s chair and leaned forward, his hands out, palms up. “She was pretty, and her family was rich, and for some strange reason, she liked Fleming! They walked the halls together, her family’s limo picked him up with her and delivered him home! Wherever that was...nobody knew. Nobody wanted to know.”

Collapsing backward into the chair, the big man grimaced as his face displayed a resigned look. “And nobody ever knew what happened to either of them. He didn’t return to school his senior year, neither did she. We didn’t really care what happened. Fleming was anything but missed. I was one year behind him, and my last two years of high school were actually pleasant. Slowly, I forgot about him. Or at least, I thought I had!”

Leaping to his feet then, my patient began to pace back and forth, behind the chair. “I’ve always been a homebody. I’ve hardly left the area, except for my stint in the Army. When I came back, I used the GI Bill to get in some college courses, but I never graduated. Instead I did like most people in this town, I got a job at the mill. I was on the safety crew. Yesterday, I quit. Quit! So did everybody else who was at the accident scene yesterday! We all quit!”

I remained seated at my desk, making notes. He continued.

“You probably heard about the accident.” I glanced up and nodded. “I didn’t hear exactly what happened,” I replied, softly.

“It was a horrible accident, but at least it was understandable. We’d never had a serious accident in the extrusion plant. Little stuff, sure. Someone gets a bashed finger, someone trips over a cord that wasn’t supposed to be there. Day before yesterday, that changed.”

“Late at night, on third shift,” he continued, “the overhead crane operator suffered a heart attack. Everyone in a job like his has regular physical exams, he was no different. But he was as old as me, and sometimes it just happens. He slumped over the controls, still gripping a couple of the levers. And crap started to happen, all of it bad!”

At this point I saw that, while older, this gent, this new patient of mine, was in great physical condition. He continued to pace, but reached high above his head and stooped low as he graphically described the scene of an industrial accident. I think I realized at that point I wouldn’t have been able to restrain him physically at all. Tall, strong, powerfully built and fit. What had I been thinking? Beads of sweat had formed on his bald pate, and they glistened as his unconstrained presentation unfolded before me. I felt as though I was there, in the factory, as it happened.

“High-crane operators are pretty careful. They have to be. The ingots are heated till the metal flows, and then until they’re white-hot. The big extrusion press then pushes out groaning white-hot rods of metal, twisting and writhing like spaghetti, several strands at once, sometimes fifteen centimeters in diameter, from this press. First cooling is done with a blast of hot air, then cooler air, then water spray is directed at the metal. The spray doesn’t even reach it for a while. There’s too much heat. The sounds are indescribable, the hot metal snapping and popping. There’s so much steam rolling off of the new rods that it has to be swept away with high-pressure blowers so the workers can see.”

“When it’s cool enough to get near, the receiving rollers direct it off to the side and workers strap it up with metal bands, the high-crane operator lifts it to the cooling and then the pickling baths, then on to sampling. Even though he has to move quickly, the crane man never lifts a load over the workers. That’s the rule. The fact that he was gripping two levers this time suggests he may have intended to stop the crane when the heart attack hit him. Instead, because he never let go, the crane jerked the load this way and then that, swinging it violently until all of it dumped out from one end. And it had eight meters to fall...right onto the next run of white-hot rods that were already coming.” He gritted his teeth and shook his head sadly.

“That’s when the carnage began. Two of the rods were struck and severed, and one writhing, white-hot band of metal cut two men in half like a Star Wars light saber, one whipped to the other side of the platform and beheaded another. It happened so fast there wasn’t even time to duck, much less run. An operator saw what happened and cut power to everything. Emergency lighting came up and the place went from screeching and groaning and hissing and whirring, to nearly dead silence in less than a minute. It wasn’t my shift, but they called me, got me out of bed. I arrived on the scene at about four in the morning.

So this was my job...to assess how much trouble the company was in before any investigators arrived. Once the site had been photographed and evaluated, for some reason we were expected to assist in the cleanup. Can you imagine? I’ve seen men killed before. I’ve had to carry bodies before. But it was nothing like this. You can’t imagine what a grisly scene it was! Just try, if you can.

But then, on a catwalk above it all, a door opened, and three men with white hardhats stepped through. One of them was practically at a run until he reached the railing. And I honestly never saw it coming.”

The big man’s face contorted, obviously well beyond even the upset I’d first seen on it.

“That was the moment I found out what happened to Fleming! That horrible, evil, clattering, clicking laugh! It rang out, it filled the building, all movement stopped! I looked up, horrified, and I realized that the two other guys who’d come through the doors onto the catwalk were just as shocked! The bastard was dancing!”

My patient’s face darkened as he lowered his chin and raised his eyes to look at me. He’d been gripping his head, but now his arms dropped as he turned his head my way. “Fleming owns the mill! He’s over the CEO, he’s over everybody! I did a search on the guy, he’s practically anonymous, but he’s filthy rich! He’s a mad-dog power broker with his tendrils into everything! His shell corporation pays off whatever political party is in power to get what he wants from it! And I can’t take it!”

I’ll never be sure, but I think his eyes began to roll as if his mind had finally left him. It’s what I think I saw. I only had a side-view of his body where he’d stopped behind the chair. He reached into his vest then, and I quickly realized he was extracting a handgun.

I leaped, made it around the end of my desk in two steps and lunged over the back of the chair, then succeeded in grasping his wrist. Grasped, but not moved. He turned his head slowly and looked me straight in the eye. His eyes were at last steady. The man was left-handed and that was the wrist I had.

“Sorry, doc. Sorry to do this here. Should have just done it. Not your fault. I’ve never been a violent man. I just can’t live in a world like this one.”

He reached with his right, removed my hand from his wrist, raised the weapon and fired, all in one fluid motion. His strength was far greater than I’d suspected.

And I’d never even begun to imagine the magnitude of force delivered by a single shot.

Months have passed. Needless to say, the police were everywhere. One inquiry led to another, and I realized my license to practice would probably come under review. I decided to avoid all of it and to close my doors, do something else. I no longer care what the authorities, such as they are, think of me. Although my practice was new, I really didn’t care about money.

I had a new pursuit.

This man Fleming. I wanted to know who, or what, he was. If he turned out to be normal, then at least I would know how sick was the man who had taken his own life as I watched. But if he wasn’t, then I really wanted to know if it was as bad as all that. My patient had a family. He had children. He had a wife. This obsession of his had trumped all of that.

He was. Fleming was.

That’s why I killed him.

I don’t regret that.

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