Finally I had him caught. I had him in an interrogation room and was finally going to ask him questions I have wanted answers to for so long. He had done so many horrible things and dodged justice for so long. I caught him and now I would now why he had done the things he had.
“So,” I started saying getting comfortable by my desk with coffee, pen and paper. “Can you please explain some things to me? I have a few questions that I am curious to hear your answers to.”
“Well, yeah, I guess you could ask whatever you want. I have confessed to what I have done already. A few questions shouldn’t be too hard to answer,” he said.
He was staring blankly into the distance. He looked completely detached from himself and the whole situation. As if he isn’t really here at all. Yet, he is completely lucid and speaks clearly and calmly.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s start with something simple: Why did you rob that bank?”
“Oh, that,” he said frowning slightly as if he tried to think back and remember. “It’s not what it looks like. I didn’t really mean to do it. It was just something that.. kind of happened. I wanted some money – not that I really needed it – but I wanted more. For some reason I wasn’t quite satisfied with what I had. I don’t remember exactly what I did or why I did it. But I would imagine I did it because I was told to do it. I wasn’t alone in it, you know. I felt that I was forced to do it.”
“But you robbed the bank on your own. Nobody else has ever been connected to this robbery. Are you saying there are more people involved and that they coerced you into robbing it?” I asked surprised and intrigued.
“Well no, not really. I said I felt forced into making a choice to rob the bank. Not that I was actually forced. It’s hard to explain it. I don’t fully remember exactly what happened.”
I just stared at him trying to figure out what he was saying.
“You have a history of mental illness?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said with a sort of renewed expression. “And it’s mostly due to my upbringing and how I have been hurt and treated by others. That is mainly the reason to why I robbed the bank. I thought that I would get better if I had more money. If I could look at a pile of money in front of me, I would feel better.”
“But you just said you didn’t remember what you had done or why you had done it?” I said, a bit puzzled.
“No, I don’t remember what happened or why, but I remember the feelings I had at around that time.
When was this, by the way?”
“Uhm, let me see here. It was in the spring two years ago,” I said.
“Oh. That was strange. I thought it was early winter four years ago. But I still remember the general feelings I had at that time as well. And they were pretty much the same. I didn’t understand what I felt though. I just knew I needed or wanted this thing, but I couldn’t figure out why and exactly what I was feeling. It’s really hard to explain. I don’t feel I have the words or means to articulate what’s in my head.”
As I listened to him rambling, I started to worry if this case would end up without a conviction and him sent to an institution where he would get four meals a day and around-the-clock care.
“You’re not making very much sense to me,” I told him. “I can’t get what you’re trying to say. It doesn’t sound very sensible to me.”
“No. I’m not saying anything I have done is very sensible or logic. But it was at the time. I see now how it is not sense in it, but that doesn’t mean that it is not how I felt at the time. What I believed and thought.”
“But it’s not possible,” I said. “We have clear evidence and proof of what you have done. We can see everything you have done and put it in a proper timeline and all.”
“I understand that,” he said. “But that is not how it happened. That wasn’t how I meant it. I didn’t mean to rob the bank and I didn’t mean to hurt those people after. They shouldn’t have been there. It was their fault that they got hurt. If they had just let me be or not bothered to get involved, nothing would’ve happened.”
“But you told these people to come to you. You invited them and you told them things that wasn’t true,” I said as I felt more and more confused and irritated.
“Yes, I know. But that wasn’t my intention. I didn’t understand what I did. I didn’t see or listen to what was going on. I had gotten stuck in a sort of narrative and I had created a set of beliefs about things that I wasn’t able to get past.”
I felt more and more that this interrogation was going nowhere. I wasn’t able to get any proper truth out of him at the moment and I felt my own energy drain out of me as I listened to his incoherent story. Because this is all it could be. A story. Delusion, lies and deception both of self and others. This wouldn’t be as easy to piece together as I first had believed.
