Not As Bad As We Imagined

“Sandor Arpad? What sort of name is that? You’re not fucking with me, right?” Officer Marcus wrinkled his nose, flushed pink, still unused to the warmth of his southern transfer. “Why would I be fucking with you? That’s his name.” Detective Maria looks into the tiny portal of the heavy steel interrogation door onto the babbling fat man within. His long black hair is matted with restless sleep and grease, and his eyes are red and puffy. He sits a densely gray room, fitting tightly into the wrought iron chair that’s screwed into the floor. He slowly rubs his eyes.

“He turned himself in an hour ago. He says he killed his best friend.” Marcus says.

              “Not surprising. He looks like a crazy.”                                                                                              

“He seems real broken up about it.” Marcus replies.

Maria raises a dark eyebrow, “Sympathy won’t get you as far here as it did up north, Officer.”

He nods, his face is blank and focused into the window. Maria sighs and mumbles, “Let’s get at it. Figure out what’s going on.” She opens the door abruptly, snapping the fat man out of his eye-rubbing stupor. He looks at the entering officers with his mouth slightly agape. He stared noiselessly, watching as though watching a terrible car crash. Officer Marcus sat across from the man, in a parallel, nailed-down chair. Maria stood at the corner of the table on Marcus’ side, her hand on her hip and her mouth in a twisted pout. They take in the silence for a moment, giving each other a minute before the discomfort sure to follow. Maria punctures the thick, hushed coat that stains the grey, institutional walls of the interrogation cell. “So tell us what happened.”  The tearful man glares at her with an impotent blend of despair and distrust. He wipes his nose with a long, loose sleeve, once white, now a greyish yellow.

“Whenever you’re ready.” Marcus adds. Sandor turns his round, speckled face towards him and nods sheepishly, staring somewhere beyond the soft blue eyes of the aging northern officer. He begins to compose himself, the opera of his confession brewing steadily inside of him. Marcus tilts his head expectantly, but Sandor then broke from his apparent readiness to push strands of oily hair behind his ears and sniff persistently. He continued to futilely inhale snot until Detective Maria lost her patience and forcefully slide the available swamp green box of tissues across the table towards him. Maria pointed at it, her mouth hard and pressed shut and her eyes exasperated. Sandor’s gaze went from the box to her, and with a shake of his head, sniffed in one more time, harder than before, and swallowed. He breathed in and began.

“Me and him had been fighting a bit for a few days.”

“You and whom?” Marcus interjects, Maria kicks him sharply in the ankle and growls, “He just got fucking started talking! I do not want to listen to snot sucking again!”

Marcus grit his teeth and did what he could to ignore the young, impatient detective and asked again, keeping Sandor’s eyes in the view of his own, “You and whom, son?”

“My best friend. We’ve lived together for a long time. But recently we started fighting.”

Sandor paused, waiting for a signal that he may keep talking. Maria was quicker, “Keep talking.”

So he continued, “So we started fighting. At first it was about little things, you know, maybe we were both just in rotten old moods and were taking it out on each other. He started off eating a bunch of my favorite snacks while I slept. I’ve been going to sleep somewhat earlier lately because I saw on the news that you are more likely to be happy during the day if you go to sleep early at night. Anyway, I could hear him munching the first night, but didn’t think anything of it until I saw my pantry was missing my favorite snack the next morning. You know those jalapeno cheese-puffs?”

Sandor stopped his story to look around at the two officers. Maria sighed and took a seat next to Marcus, no longer able to stand the way she had been. She put her head in her hands and pulled them down her face. Marcus answered, “Yes. They’re pretty good.”

Sandor’s tone rang with excitement, “Yeah! So I was pretty mad when I saw that a whole new bag was gone! I looked around for it and found the empty bag in the trash can. So I asked my friend about it.”

                Maria cut Sandor off, “What’s this friend’s name?” This question brought Sandor’s mood back to its former bleak state, dragging his eyes to stare at the cold steel table in front of him. They welled with tears. Maria pushed, “Tell us.” Marcus added quickly, “We need to know bud. We just need to know.”

                Sandor whimpered out an answer, “Bennington.” “His last name?” Marcus and Maria said simultaneously. “No. Both of his names.” Maria and Marcus looked at each other, confused. Marcus asked hesitantly, “So his name is Bennington Bennington?” All they got from the sad fat man was a curt, “Yes.”

                “I’ll go look this guy up. See if there’s anything at all. I’ll be back.” Maria quickly excuses herself and scurries out of the room, glad to have an excuse to leave Marcus with the loon who killed his best friend. Marcus prompts Sandor again and Sandor continues.

                “So after I found that out, I confronted him and asked him very nicely not to do that and that if he wanted some, I would share some with him if he just asked. The first time he said that was fine, but he was very short about it and didn’t apologize. And I thought you know, whatever he’s just in a bad mood today, or something bad happened, and I figured I’d just drop it and leave it be. But the next night he did it again. He was very loud all night, so I didn’t sleep well and if I don’t sleep well and get to sleep early then what’s the point of having seen that thing on the news? So I was grumpy when I woke up and my stomach hurt a little for some reason and when I walked into the kitchen, I saw that it was destroyed.”

                Marcus muttered, “Huh.”

                Sandor didn’t lose a step, “Yeah, right? Everything was tossed, food was everywhere, the stove was still on, there was a really badly burnt pizza in the oven, I mean it looked like a warzone. So I got real mad and shouted for him to come in. And he did and I confronted him again and he got real mad at me. He-he…” Sandor stammers off, his speech turning to bubbling and his bubbling turning to tears. Sandor chokes on what was something between a burp and a sob. Marcus swallowed nervously and Maria opened the door, “Officer Marcus. Would you step out for a moment please?” Marcus responded quickly, “Yes. Excuse me one moment Sandor.” He stepped out of the room.

                The moment Marcus shut the heavy door behind him Maria said, “There’s nobody called Bennington Bennington anywhere. Just like I figured, and I’m sure you figured. I’m telling you, he’s just hungry for attention.” She spoke with frustrated speed and indignantly sharp eyes. Marcus peered through the looking glass into the cell. This strange fat man was holding his face in his over-long sleeves, which slowly darkened with tears. He shook sickeningly and Marcus wished to understand. He clenched his jaw and then spoke to Maria, “There’s something going on here. I think we need to figure it out. Before he hurts himself or someone else.” His gaze returned to Maria and fixed on her hazel eyes and he saw her hardness loosen, “Yeah. I guess we should.”  With that, they returned to the room together, sliding the heavy door open and dipping into the cell.

                As the two police sat down, Marcus saw that Maria was about to speak. “So we looked up your friend. We didn’t find him anywhere.” Sandor stared at the woman before him, tears running down his cheeks, his eyes red and weak. He balled his hands into fists that made a squish in his snotty sleeves. He answered slowly, “Well he never did any crime. Of course you wouldn’t find him.” Maria was quick with the rebuttal, “We found you. And your record is clean. You’ve never even had a parking ticket. But we found you in the system.” Sandor watched Maria’s unwavering face with the silence of a guilty toddler. There was no understanding in his blurry eyes, but there was a tinge of fear. Maria pressed on, “Did you give us the real name? Or is there no name to give?” In Maria’s mind, she hoped that he was simply a mad man who killed his cat. “Did you even kill anyone?”

                At the word ‘kill’ Sandor again returned to his persistent sobs. In hopes of curtailing the limitless whimpers and wails of the fat man before them, Marcus resumes the line of questioning that they had undertaken before checking the name of Sandor’s purported friend. He reaches out to Sandor, who is now slumped forward and dripping tears from his saturated sleeves onto the steel table and taps his shoulder. In his head, Marcus wonders if Sandor feels dehydrated. “Hey. Listen up.” Sandor lifts his head slowly, as though weighed down by heavy balls of lead attached to chains. “Keep telling us the story. The story of what happened. If you tell us, the guilt will go away.”

                Sandor stuttered, “R-r-really?” His face looked hopeful.

                “Really.”

                “O-Okay.”

                With that, Sandor finally took a sheet from the box of tissues that sat uselessly in front of him. He blew his nose feverishly, looked into the tissue to see what he had produced, balled it up and stuck it in his pocket. “What did he say when he got mad at you Sandor?”

                Sandor breathed in deeply and slowly, making both of the officers recoil slightly, in fear of another outburst. However, instead of more shed tears, he spoke, “He was just very mean. He called me fat, and it’s not like I don’t realize that, it’s just not something I really need to hear. I heard it a lot already and I don’t need that from someone I’m supposed to love and who’s supposed to love me. He said I was hopeless and that I was a failure. He said I didn’t have a future and I didn’t even have an interesting past. I didn’t know what to say, I was so stunned. It hurt so bad that I thought I was just going to cry, but I didn’t want to break down in front of him after that. I got lucky though because he stormed out when I didn’t answer. He said some word I didn’t understand and left.”

                “Tell me Sandor.” Marcus said, “What is it that you do? For work, for fun, what do you do?”

                Sandor seemed thrown off by the question, and Maria looked over at Marcus with an expression of befuddlement that bordered on accusation.

                The fat man began, “Well… Uuh, for work I make websites for people. I was into that stuff in high school when it all first started. I learned how to do it and since then I’ve just kept up with updates and stuff. For fun I like TV. When I was a kid I liked to play outside, make shootout scenes with sticks, but that stopped as I got older, you know?”

                Marcus then asked, “What would you and Bennington do together?”

                “Well, before he started being real cold we would go to the park and goof around together, sometimes we would play on the kid’s swings and stuff, or we would listen to music together. We both really liked Elvis Costello and-and we would listen to guys like Dean Martin in the dark for hours. We’d watch TV together. We always got a kick out of Ellen. She just seems like a wonderful lady. I’d like to meet her someday.”

                Marcus felt the familiar pang of a theory forming. He thought that he may have figured it out.

                “And do you have any family or friends? People you, you know, see regularly other than Bennington?”

                Sandor peered to his left, “My dad left when I was real little. My mom was pretty nice, but she died a few years ago. I spent a lot of time in my own brain, just thinking about stuff. I never really had any friends except for, you know.” With that, Sandor choked again and clamped his eyes shut, this time fighting back the tears that clearly welled behind his pink, raw eyelids.

                Marcus mulled over Maria’s theory that Sandor is doing this for attention. The man seemed lonely, that’s for sure, but he didn’t seem to be particularly hungry for approval or disapproval. He seemed to just be. Marcus then spoke, “So I assume Bennington came back after your fight with him. What happened then?”

                Sandor took a deep breath and began the second act, “When he came back he was angrier. But he didn’t break anything, he just came into the room where I was watching TV. Ellen was on. He stood in front of it for a minute and when I asked him to move, he turned it off. I got real mad then, you know, because he had been so rude to me earlier and he’s been acting like a cold jerk and I stood up and yelled. I-I yelled that I was going to kick his ass if he didn’t tell me why he was being such a jerk. He laughed at me then, and I never heard such a cruel laugh before, even in school, or even on TV. He said that I was too fat to fight him and that by the time I got up I’d be dying of diabetes. So that got me going and I stood up and I yelled about how he’s been so terrible lately and how he needs to respect the place we share and clean up after himself and not eat my stuff and not touch my stuff and how he needs to shut up every once in a while.”

                He was breathing quickly and heavily by now, worked up by the recollection. His tone was rapid and his eyes were made all the more intense by the cracks of red webbing slung over them. The officers glance quickly at each other, not sure of what to say during this pause. They both decide to wait the silence out. Sandor’s breathing normalizes a little and he continues, “So I told him to shut up and he gets this real angry face and he grinds his teeth all menacingly. So I egg him on, saying stuff like ‘what?’ and ‘you got something to say?’ and he screams at me at the top of his lungs, h-he says… He says…”

                Sandor breaks off again, a low and quiet wail coming from deep within him. He hangs his head and, as soon as the moan fully leaves his body he starts hyperventilating. He wraps his arms around himself, tears freely falling into his lap.

                “Oh jeez.” Maria exclaims. Marcus gets up and stands behind Sandor’s chair. He gently pats Sandor’s back and says, “Let it out, son. We want to know. We can help you if we know.”

                That comment makes the shivering fat man angry and he yells, “Help me? Help me how? Are you going to bring him back?” His hyperventilation becomes a loud and snotty snarl, in through the nose and out through an angry mouth. Ever the patient man, Marcus calmly says, “We can’t bring him back. But we can help you. You could be in a lot of trouble here. We can try to alleviate that.” Sandor slowly calmed down. Marcus stayed behind him, hand on his shoulder. Maria watched the two of them.

                “When he screamed at me...” Sandor trails off and starts again, “When he screamed at me he said he never really liked me. He said he only used me for my stuff and because I was also so willing to ‘be his b-bitch.’ He admitted some stuff to me, some real terrible stuff. He said he was the one who peed in my camp tent in fourth grade and that he was the one who drew gross stuff all over the school bathrooms and then convinced the other kids to say it was me to get me in trouble and then he told me th-that h-h-he’s the one who killed my puppy when I was a little kid! He leaned in real c-close to my face and with a big smile he told me! He said he fed it rat poison he found under a shelf! My mom hit me so much after that and she never ever let me have another puppy! She never believed me that it wasn’t me!”

                Sandor huffed frantically and tears streamed down his cheeks.

                “I-I had a rage tunnel. I don’t remember what I did or said, but when I came back, I was holding a knife and he was gone. I panicked and cried for a while and then I c-came here. I killed him… I killed my only and best friend.” Sandor slowly raised his head. His eyes had red rims and were wet. His hair, disheveled and greasy. His lips pouted in pain. He looked to the officers for something. Even Sandor was unsure of what. Perhaps it was sympathy, perhaps it was scorn. Marcus walked around the table to Maria and whispered in her ear. Her eyes lit up. Marcus was certain now. Then he said, “You came here right after the murder?”

                “Yes.”

                Marcus chewed the inside of his cheek. “You said he was gone. What did you mean by that?”

                “He disappeared. He was g-gone…”

                “Where did he get the name Bennington Bennington?”

                “I-I gave it to him when I met him.”

                “Where did you meet him Sandor?”

                “I asked him to come and be my friend when I was six. He came and he was nice to me. He was the first to ever be nice to me.”

                “Where did he come from?”

                “H-He…” Sandor broke off, the realization creeping over him. Tears streamed, but they were different now. Of a loss more profound than the death of a friend. Marcus pushed for an answer, “Where, son?”

                Resigned and heartbroken, Sandor gave the true answer, "A better place.”

                Maria stood out of her chair and spoke, “Alright Sandor. It’s time to go. We’re going to try to find some counselors to recommend to you. Let’s go. She reaches her hand out to him. He looks up at her for a moment and takes it. His hand is slick with sweat and tears. Maria cringes, but holds it in, showing no sign of disgust. As she leaves with him she looks at Marcus with a dual look of triumph and sorrow. Marcus gives her a little nod. As the cell door closes behind her, Marcus sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. What a day.