The Syndrome (20 page)

“Yeah,” Sutton replied sarcastically, “that’s what I’m afraid of.” Then he turned to Adrienne. “I have to tell you: a subject this jumpy? I don’t know what we’re going to get.”

“Oh, fahcrissake, that’s what he always says!” Bonilla exclaimed. “Just ask him the questions, would ya?”

Sutton returned to the testing room, and closed the door behind him. Adrienne went over to the window, and looked out. Bonilla ran a hand through his hair and shook his head. “Man,” he said, “did you see that guy? I swear, he could hardly breathe.”

Adrienne nodded. “I felt sorry for him,” she muttered, and it was true. For a moment, it seemed as if he was coming apart at the seams. Then he got it together. Somehow.

“Well, don’t get carried away,” Bonilla told her. “Just because he’s fucked up, that don’t make him a good guy.”

She nodded a second time. “I know,” she replied, and picked up the phone to check the messages at her office. Behind the door, she could hear Duran and the polygrapher talking, but she couldn’t tell what was being said.

“Are you sitting in a chair? Wait to answer.” Duran counted to three, and said, “Yes.” “Is today November 8th?”

Again, he waited as he’d been told to do, and then replied, “Yes.”

The polygrapher watched the graph being drawn on his monitor. “Am I sitting across from you? Answer ‘No.’”

Duran did as he was told. And then they got down to business.

“Is your real name Jeffrey Duran?”

“Yes.”

“Are you a licensed clinical psychologist?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Just answer the question, yes or no,” Sutton scolded. “Are you a licensed clinical psychologist?”

“Yes.”

“Was your treatment of Nico Sullivan meant to be in her best interest?”

“Yes.”

After Duran had left in a taxi, Adrienne and Bonilla went into the testing room, where Sutton was printing out a copy of the results.

“So?” Bonilla asked, rubbing his hands together. “Whatta we got?”

The polygrapher looked at Adrienne, and shrugged. “What we’ve ‘got’… is George Washington.”

Bonilla frowned. “Paul … don’t do this to me. What are you talkin’ about?”

“He’s Jeffrey Duran.”

“No, he’s not,” Bonilla told him.

“Well, he
thinks
he is,” Sutton replied. “And when he says he’s a clinical psychologist, he thinks he’s telling the truth.”

“Get outa here,” Bonilla exclaimed. “We
know
he’s lying. He’s in the Death Index!”

The polygrapher shook his head, sat back in his chair, and turned the palms of his hands upward, as if to say,
What can I tell you?

Adrienne spoke up. “Just before the test, you suggested the results might not be reliable.”

“That’s true,” Sutton admitted. “But that was because he was so overwrought, so stressed, I was afraid everything he said would look like a lie. But that’s not what I got. Look,” he said, and beckoned them around to his side of the table.

On the computer screen were four graphs, arranged in tiers, one on top of the other. Using the mouse, Sutton put the cursor on the line marked pneumo 1, and clicked. Instantly, the other lines disappeared, and pneumo 1 filled the screen. “See this?” he asked, moving the cursor to a sharp peak that spiked above the line’s median wave. “That’s a lie.”

“How do you know?” Adrienne asked.

“Question number 4: ‘Is my shirt yellow? Answer yes.’” Sutton pinched the fabric of his white shirt, and shook it to illustrate the point. Then he flipped the monitor from one screen to another—pneumo 2, cardio, and gsr. Similar spikes could be seen in about the same place on each graph.

“So?” Bonilla asked.

“So we know what a lie looks like when Mr. Duran is telling one. Now, look at this,” he told them, moving the cursor to a wobble in the gsr line. “That’s the truth. You can see: there’s no stress at all.”

“What was the question?” Adrienne wondered.

“Another test question: ‘Are you sitting in a chair?’ Answer: ‘yes.’ He was sitting right across from me.”

“And when you asked him if he was Jeffrey Duran?”

Sutton consulted his notes, and moved the cursor to a part of the graph that was nearly flat. “You see what I mean?” Then he flipped the screens, one after another. “cardio. abdominal pneumograph. thoracic pneumograph. There’s nothing. He’s practically flat lining.”

Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Finally, Bonilla chuckled. “The son of a bitch beat the polygraph!”

Sutton tried to object “You can’t beat—”

“He
beat
it, Paul! We
know
he’s not Duran.”

“He
thinks
he is.”

“Bullshit.”

They fell quiet again, and the noise of the traffic on Old Keene Mill Road was suddenly apparent, a low hum. Finally, Sutton said, “You can’t really ‘beat’ the polygraph—” As Bonilla started to object, Sutton held up his hand, as if he were answering a question in class. “Hear me out,” he told them. “What you can do—if you’re really good—is muddy the results.”

“What about drugs?” Bonilla demanded. “A couple of Valium—”

“Even with drugs, the most you could do is create some ambiguities. But that’s not what I’m seeing on this test. There aren’t any ambiguities. Every indicator’s crystal clear.”

“So where does that leave us?” Adrienne asked.

“Well, if it looks like the truth, but you
know
it’s a lie, I suppose it’s possible …”

“What’s possible?” Bonilla insisted.

“That he’s a psychopath—”

“Bingo!” Bonilla exclaimed.

“It’s very rare,” the polygrapher remarked, “but it may be that Mr. Duran—whoever he is—it may be that he’s not wired the way you and I are.”

“How do you mean?” Adrienne asked.

“A psychopath is someone who’s devoid of empathy, someone who lacks all moral dimension. So we’re talking about a person who doesn’t really
distinguish
between good and bad in an ethical sense. It’s just a question of what feels good—for
them.
So lying doesn’t generate any stress at all. And these machines … well, that’s what they measure. So …”

“But when you asked him to lie, it did cause stress. You showed us. ‘Is my shirt yellow?’”

Sutton smiled. “Right. Well, the truth is that when I said you couldn’t beat a polygraph machine, what I meant was that you couldn’t fake the truth. But you
can
fake a lie.”

“How?”

“By generating stress. Some criminals know this and use various techniques to produce polygraph results that are ‘
inconclusive.’ Because if every response reads as a lie—even clearly truthful ones such as verifying one’s name….” He shrugged. “The results are useless.”

“What techniques?”

Sutton shrugged again. “Long division works well. The operator poses a question. The subject does a little math as he responds to the question, the stress caused by the calculation makes the response look like a lie. Or you could bite the inside of your mouth, pinch yourself. Pain shows up as stress, too.”

“So,” Adrienne said, “you’re telling us Duran knew that he had to make the responses that were clearly lies
look
like lies.”

Sutton pressed his hands together. “Well, Eddie did say the both of you were surprised when this guy agreed to the test. So maybe he’s been around the block a few times.”

“What he’s saying, Scout, is that your boy is a cold son of a bitch—is that about right, Paulie?”

Sutton nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah,” he said. “If you’re right about who he is … it’s a wonder he’s got any arms and legs.”

“What do you mean?” Adrienne asked, looking puzzled.

Bonilla chuckled. “He means—”

Sutton nodded. “The guy’s a snake.”

Leaning back against the seat of the taxi, Duran watched the windows run with steam, and listened to the tires’ sloshing in the rain. He should have felt better. He
should be
happy.
It was obvious from the polygrapher’s body language that he’d passed the test with flying colors. Which ought to have left him feeling … validated, or something. But all he really felt was a vague unease—as if “the other shoe” had yet to drop.

Up front, the windshield wipers were working overtime, but not to much purpose. The rain was falling in microbursts, puffs of fine spray followed by sheets of water that slowed the cab to a crawl.

“This is some bad shit,” the driver remarked.

Duran nodded and, noticing the tiny flag on the dash, replied without thinking,
“Lavalas.”

The driver did a double take, and glanced at his passenger in the rearview mirror.
“Pale Creole, zanmi?”

Duran looked at him. “What?”

“I said,
pale Creole
—no?”

Duran shook his head, uncertain what he meant. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

The driver chuckled and shrugged. “Just a few words, then.
Lavalas
—big rain.”

Duran nodded, uncertain how he’d known the word. From television, maybe, but …
zanmi
meant ‘friend.’ Somehow, he knew that one, too.
Christ
, he thought, and looked out the window at a smear of glowing, red taillights.

“Looka that!” the driver exclaimed. “Standing
wa
tuh!”

Duran saw that, up ahead, a Lexus was stalled in a pool of water. The water covered most of two lanes, and all the traffic had to squeeze around it.

“You mind a little music, chief?”

Duran shook his head. “No. Music would be fine.”

The driver shoved a cassette into the console. “I wish I had some
konpa
for you, but my other customers, they don’t like the horns. So, I carry Marley …” The tape began to play.

The cab inched forward and stopped, inched forward and
stopped, strangely in tempo with the music. Duran sat back and closed his eyes, thinking,
Konpa … But whose konpa? Eklips’? … Sweet Micky … Tabou.
Where did he get this? How did he know this music? From television? He didn’t think so. It was more like—déjà vu, or that reincarnation business he’d been thinking about.

And it made him shiver.

Because something was going on in his head, and whatever it was, it was totally beyond his control. It was as if his identity, his sense of self, was peeling away like paint from an old house.

There were moments when he seemed to remember—actually
remember
—another life. The cabbie’s voice—
Pale Creole, zanmi?
—and his round, black face … They were Haiti in the flesh. He could
smell
the place—a montage of jasmine, rum, and sewage. It was a place he’d been to, a place he really knew. He was sure of that. But when? And why? He couldn’t say. All he knew was that his memory of Haiti was three-dimensional and eidetic, unlike so many other memories (unlike, for instance, the memory of his mother). It was real, and not a pastiche of television shows and articles.

Nor was that all. There were other memories he couldn’t explain, or fragments of them.

He seemed, for instance, to know a lot about mycology. This expertise had surfaced in the supermarket, when he’d been picking out shiitakes. Suddenly, he’d realized that the terminology of mushrooms was as familiar to him as the names of presidents—a litany of boluses, gills, and mycelia. Where did that come from?

And sailing. He’d owned a sailboat once, he was almost sure of it. Somewhere with a lot of fog. Portland, maybe, or Vancouver. But, no. Those were just names he’d picked out of the air. He didn’t
see
them, really. But the sailing—he could
feel the water sliding under the hull, taste the spray, see the light dancing on the waves, feel the salt grit on his skin.

But it was all so ephemeral. No sooner would the memories begin to surface than they’d disappear. And no matter how hard he tried to hold on to them, no matter how hard he tried to
explore
them, they dissolved in his mind as completely as cubes of sugar in a cup of tea. And then he was left, not with a memory, but with the memory
of a
memory.

The driver was on Connecticut now, driving past the National Zoo. A bloodred pool of neon light lay in the darkness outside the Monkey Bar, blinking on and off. Duran shifted uncomfortably in his seat, looking away from the street.

There was one memory that he didn’t want to surface, that he tried desperately not to recall. It was an image that made his stomach turn, a tableau of ochre walls in a suburban abattoir. Gore congealing against the stenciled border where the wall met the ceiling. It was everywhere, the blood. Thick and clotted, it pooled on the floor and stuck to his shoes.

“You okay?”

He must have moaned because the driver was looking at him in the rearview mirror, his face furrowed with concern.

Duran nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I—I’ve got a bad tooth.”

The driver grinned as the cab pulled up to the portico in front of Duran’s apartment building. “For a moment,” he said, “I’m thinking a
loa
has you.” Then he laughed.

Duran smiled and shook his head. Handing the driver a twenty-dollar bill, he reached to open the door and step out. Above his head, the rain was pounding on the roof, a sudden deluge.

“You can wait, my friend,” the driver told him in a solicitous voice. “Sit tight. Or you’ll be soaked before you get inside.”

Duran thanked him, but got out anyway, and just as the driver had promised, he was instantly soaked to the skin. Not
that he minded. The rain and the cold took his mind off the ochre room. And that was a blessing.

After a long moment of standing in the rain, he entered the building’s antiseptic lobby, which was silent and deserted.
Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig
, he thought, the words larded with sarcasm. The truth was, he felt no connection whatsoever to this place. It was like an all suite hotel, or the apartment of a friend who’d gone out of town for the weekend. Comfortable, certainly, but nothing to do with him.

Five minutes later he was in the shower, with the steam rising and the water tap dancing on his shoulders. He’d begun to feel better as soon as he entered the apartment, but he didn’t feel
good
—really
good
—until he’d toweled off, and was sitting on the couch with the remote in his hand, watching Jane Pauley.