Chapter 4: The Assessment

“Mr. MacGowan, tell me as much as you are comfortable sharing,” Dr. Torrent kept her eyes steady and omnipotent as they looked directly into his.
“OK sergeant doctor, can I call you that or do you prefer Doc?” he saw her flinch and instantly regretted the harsh tone he had spoken to her in but was not sure why. As if in apology he added, “stop calling me Mr. MacGowan.”
She considered his response; she studied his eyes with a mysterious caution,
“What would you like me to call you?” she asked.
“Trent,” he said.
“Trent,” she said and saw him shudder as he met her gaze. The wide chasm of his pupils dilated as the prism shifting shades of blue and gray irises swirled ---compelling. She bit thoughtfully on the corner of her lower lip in an absent way that seemed to be her habit, as if chewing over her own thoughts.
“I am here to help you, —Trent… Do you want to be helped? Or are you on a self-sabotaging mission? It’s best to let me know from the beginning instead of playing childish games. Games irritate me.”
“So you prefer to cut to the chase.”
“I’m not impressed with arrogant shows of spoiled brats. I don’t have time to pander to egos. And it just gets on my nerves, to be honest.”
…a song played in his mind…The night haunts me as dawn now arises…. so does evening then demise? And all our plans to be revised? Or is it better to be realized? Is this a mask I doth devise? What is the compromise? I am straight jacketed in mental lockjaw. Call me pretty boy…whipping boy…. a mirror as a mask is a …face that I claim here to be, let me put it down, let me take it off -- let me, please… let me…please. Let me mirror you, mirror your mask of faces: created by an artist….
“Tell me what happened.”
“Tell me why I should trust you.”
“Because I’m your best bet. Your only hope here.”
“Hope here for what?”
“For getting you out of this mess.”
“How do you figure that?” he asked. “You determine I’m crazy I don’t go to jail but I get to stay locked up in here instead?”
“Who said I thought you were crazy?”
“Don’t you?”
“Actually, no”
“So what am I doing here, doctor?”
“You tell me.”
“What’s it say in your report there?”
“Why are you protecting her?”
“Who?”
“The person you were arrested for killing. Hmm… all that blood… how gruesome…”
“Blood?” his face seemed to go whiter, if that was possible.
The cool expression on the doctor’s face took a while for Trent MacGowan to register. Dr. Torrent continued to study his face with clinical detachment.
“You bitch! What’s going on?”
“You tell me, Trent.”
“Fuck you! --And your fucking mind games! You think you can mind- fuck me? Dr. Torrent-- or Doctor Tor-ment? Let’s see who can win at that game, didn’t you know that is my trademark? …What happened to her? Tell me!” his voice broke in a cry of despair openly pleading with her.
“You obviously care about her. You wouldn’t kill her.”
“I didn—stop fucking with me and tell me the Goddamn truth, you fucking bitch!” losing his self control, he’d forgotten about his bound arms and tried to lunge at her, but fell over onto the floor in a pathetic heap. With a rush of pity she released his straight jacket in one motion. He sprung to his feet and grabbed her by the shoulders. Now standing, Trent MacGowan towered over Dr. Torrent, his long arms and legs seeming three times longer upon his sudden release. Dr. Torrent remained cool, as if used to being physically accosted by her patients. She overcame him easily with a strength that he found surprising. The force of this physical exchange seemed to leave Trent MacGowan exhausted and he crumpled back down to the floor in a heap of sobs. “Please tell me doctor…. Is she dead? Please stop doing this to me, just tell me, I need to know.”
“Well you obviously didn’t kill her.”
He was openly crying in grieving horrible anguish, his face hidden behind large, elegant, long-fingered hands that tapered into beautifully shaped tips and nail beds. He had musician’s hands-- the doctor could not help but notice, strong fingers with characteristically grooved knuckles and modest grace. These were not murderous hands; these hands belonged to a sensitive artist who possessed intense emotions.
“There is still no body,” Dr. Torrent sighed and coolly walked over towards the windows to look outside into the full mooned October night.
“So you were just fucking with me, weren’t you? --Fucking emotional vampire bitch?”
With whiplash coldness he heard the doctor say,
“So are we done with our game playing now?”
“Yeah, if you are. I thought you were suppose to be honest.” He leered at her threateningly, like a lizard king, looking at her now with open accusation. And hurt? Looking every square foot the ominous rock star known for his ear-piercing, hard-core sound, masochistically edged with the melodious ballads that made the females swoon. What an amazing contradiction he was she thought: threatening at the same time as man-child in juxtaposition like a slippery fish with two minds. Right now the twist of his mouth in a grimace reminded her of a shark.
“Let me know when you feel like talking,” Dr. Torrent began walking in the direction of the door, picking up the folder that contained his report, her combat boots making clank-thud sounds over the wood floor.
When she reached the door he said,
“Wait.”
She stopped, turned slowly and looked at him, waiting.
Now his expression had changed, it had turned back to the gentle, angelic face like one of his faces from a magazine cover, with the huge, bigger than life baby-blue eyes deceptively fringed with spiky wet lashes. He looked at her with a look of coy charm,
“Aren’t you going to tie me back up, baby?”
Dr. Torrent laughed softly, then turned the door handle and continued on her way,
“I think civilization will be safe for now,” she opened the door and began to leave.
“Please don’t leave me here…” there was something in his voice that made her hesitate….
“No—wait…. Doctor…. Please don’t go yet.”
Something about the pitch of his tone stopped her. She turned back to face him. He walked over to her and even as he was twice her height he seemed boyish and vulnerable. His eyes pleading with her openly, like hypnotic swirls that caught her by surprise. The mask had dropped away a little.
He said,
“Please don’t leave me here.”
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She looked up into his face and found empathy for his present state, imagining how she would feel if she were him in this exact situation. Dr. Torrent shut the door and stood looking at him thoughtfully noting the sheer panic within his eyes and familiar with how that felt she nodded with a gentle sigh. Her own guard dropped too. She glanced around the room. There was not much to it, except that it was quite large and there were plenty of windows—too bad the view outside of them was grotesquely bleak this time of year. Images of Ichabod Crane came to mind. The walls inside the room were bare and the only object to look at was the institutional desk that seemed to judge everything that it faced. I would hate to be left here, she thought now berating herself and looked at him with sincere sympathy.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “this must be a very horrible time for you. I wasn’t sure where you stood in all this.”
“That’s OK. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I antagonized you. I’m not usually like this.”
“That’s understandable,” Dr. Torrent walked around the room thoughtfully, her combat boots making thud sounds that echoed in the emptiness.
Trent MacGowan moved over to the desk chair and sat down, burying his face in his hands. His long arms and legs seemed caricature-ly too big for the chair he occupied, the white straight jacket, now undone looking massive and huge on his bony frame as the buckles hung off in a helter-skelter fashion seeming to mock his situation.
“Do you feel like talking?”
He looked up at her, his face full of complete, utter despair and his brooding brows knit together in the middle as if pleading. His eyes as wide as the full moon outside and just as stark. After a long silence he finally said,
“I don’t know what I feel like. To be honest. I just don’t know what I would do, doctor, if you left me alone right now…. I’ve been alone in this room since they arrested me this morning and dumped me here ….” He turned his head towards the ancient gothic windows glancing at the glowing moon, “and now it’s after twilight. I don’t really understand why I’m being accused of this….
“And the sick part of all this is that I think I would prefer to be in here, anyway, because I think I’d feel worse out there wondering where she was. But then, I’d be able to go look for her, or try to call her… I don’t know what I’m saying… do you have any idea why I am being accused of killing her?”
“Your lawyer told me that she had asked for a court order to keep you away from her last week. She filed a restraining order.”
Trent MacGowan was thoughtful as he digested this information. He was calm and did not react.
“Did you know about that?” Dr. Torrent asked him.
“Yes. I did.”
“Why would she have done that?”
“We were fighting a lot.”
“Physically?”
Now he became tense,
“she’s the one who’s more prone to getting physical that way. Lisa is the one who gets violent. She loses her temper. She’s come at me with a knife before and, you know, I’m a lot bigger than she is so I can handle myself against her if I have to protect myself.”
“Could you tell me what your relationship is with her?”
He looked up at Dr. Torrent with a wry smile,
“that is… a very complicated story.”
“Well, try to describe it the best you can.”
He ran a hand through his erratic bleached white hair and sat exhaustedly back in the chair, lank arms and legs dropping to his sides,
“we used to be involved—like years ago. I was very into her. She was into me. But things got pretty weird. Fame can do that. Success and all the media… the money… we were also a lot younger back then. That was over fifteen years ago. Fifteen years…. Crazy, sometimes I can’t believe I got this old. We were kids back then. The whole fame trip seemed so wild, we couldn’t handle it all. We went our separate ways. Then a lot of things happened in our lives. Life shit, you know. Tragedies, messed up shit that really ages your soul and I guess we found ourselves with each other one night at the right time and the right place --or not… we’ve been through a lot of stuff and … sometimes just having someone there who knows you and has known you through it all and remembers you from before everything changed… we keep going back to each other. I see other people, she sees other people but after the breakups, the bad press, the legal fiascoes the phone rings and its her and … I go back.”