It was the first time Madeline Eisman had been accused of murder, and she was terrified. She sat in a frigid, chrome chair behind a table made from the same unforgiving material as the seat, a material that, whenever you looked at it, always projected your face back at you as though it were concealing something that was hiding behind it. Even though there was no other side, it was seemed to the woman no different from the one-way mirror to her left.

Everything about the table was acute, with its very simple six-foot by three-foot proportions and its lack of anything aside from flat surfaces and unrounded, sharp right angles that made each edge like a razor and each corner as dangerous as the point of a sword. It was eerily smooth and pristine—there wasn’t a single scratch on the surface. The only impurity was the constant thickening and fading of Madeline’s breath fog on the polished, pond-like surface, hiding her face, revealing it, hiding, revealing, hiding again. Finally, she couldn’t take the strobing any longer, so she held her breath.
Madeline watched as her green eyes blinked and gazed out at her from the table, her lashes still full of lustrous, obsidian mascara from her job, and she saw her pointed nose dipping down—or or should it be up?—in the reflection. She leaned in towards the table like a bored child in a desk at school, and glared even more intensely. After all that she had been through that night, she barely recognized her reflection.
She was sweating intensely from the rush of adrenaline, so most of her makeup was running down her face. She looked horrible. Eisman noticed that for the first time since she had looked in a mirror that her features were lightless, completely different from her usual vivacious appearance. Her cheeks were hanging oddly over her cheekbones like deflated balloons, so she looked as though she were starving to death, and her makeup was coming off in such large quantities that her foundation no longer covered her freckles or the dark splotches under her eyes. The strawberry-blond hair that often clouded the top of her vision was pulled back, and it hung behind her head stiffly like thousands of pendulums, swinging only at the roots where the stiff tresses met her head, poking her neck like needles because the police had not permitted her to wash out her hair spray. The skin around the eyes was sagging and wrinkled, too, because they were open wider than they had ever been in her life. She wanted to know what the hell was going on.
When the officers had come into the room, Eisman had been covered in blood and yet still all dressed up, having just left her shift tending the bar at the nightclub, Verdant. She remembered the moment when they had come crashing through the doorway vividly, even though it seemed like years ago; the long, stiff squad car ride that had followed the discovery of the woman standing over a gored corpse had been the final barrier between Then and Now, had been the orifice, the opening that had sucked her into the black hole. As she sat in the shiny, painful chair, buttons digging into her flesh and making those horrible metal-on-metal scraping sounds across the flawless steel, Madeline Eisman knew that the true inception had been the migraine.
It had been a strange kind of headache that had settled deep-seated and heavy in the back of her skull like molten lead, but pulsating. Eisman remembered the moment when the pain had begun to squeeze down on her nerves like an immense boa constrictor, coiled in the back of her head, stirring. She had been at the bar when it had begun to awake, and she had not been surprised as it did, for she had known it was only a matter of time before this happened to her after her having stood in the neon club environment for so long, bass pumping so hard she could feel it rattle her brain around in her skull. She had smiled it off, smiled at the guy sitting across the counter and leaned up to him, pulling forward extra far, until she was nearly right up against the customer. She desperately needed the tip. Like your drink? she had shouted over the music. Not bad, he had shouted back, or at least that’s what she had seen on his lips. Madeline had once thought it would be fun to work in the clubs, to make an extra dollar—alongside her career, of course—in the business of night life. But that had been long before she had come to terms with the real world, with the fact that her ‘career’ was always going to be sitting alone in her home, staring at the wall where there was never going to be a television; and with the blunt fact that in her profession, if that’s what you would call it, when you were old enough to feel the migraine set in at a nightclub, you were in the process of losing your body, your young physique, that is, and therefore your job. She knew it was happening to her. But, as she had leaned into the counter, feeling it press harder and harder into her skin, she had been surprised she had stopped suddenly, flooded with another sudden jolt of pain, stronger. The headaches usually stayed at a dull throb when she was in the overstimulating environment inside Verdant. After an awkward pause the young man had shouted something that was impossible to understand over the music. Anyway, she hadn’t listened. In fact, all she had done for a moment was stood there frozen, her head had hurt so much. Cringing, she felt the headache even as she sat an hour later in the interrogation room; it was pounding like a foreign mass of twisted muscle in the back of her head, throbbing. Just sixty minutes before, she would have diagnosed it as a simple case of too much night life. But now, she was certain it was a premonition. Because that was when it had begun, all the terror, all the blame. And she had felt it, and she still felt it. The pain in her head had stayed long after she left the bar, and she felt like it would stick with her until she got the message. The agony had peaked when she had found the body, blood still squirting two feet in the air—how did it do that?—and she had collapsed, but it was still there, as much as the chrome chair hurt her legs the neuralgia still tore at her head, fading far too slowly, and beginning to burn its way through the thin membrane that divided her brain and her mind. It hurt unimaginably, because the devastating headache that had been plaguing her for the hour which had taken years was eating her alive. It was the pain of not knowing. Every time it hit her it hit her the same as the way the the ocean would hit a child, in waves, knocking her down each time she tried to stand; every time it surged she felt helpless. She didn’t know where it came from, the migraine, but she could tell it was somewhere fierce—when she had finally left her shift at Verdant, she had tried in vain and in so many ways to reduce it. She had turned the lights out, plunging herself into darkness, and shut her eyes tight. She had tried plugging her ears, and laying down on the floor curled into a ball. She had screamed and screamed so loud she couldn’t even hear the music any more, writhing on the floor of the bathroom. But, no matter what she had done, she could still feel it thumping in her chest, the music and the migraine, like it was in her blood, and like, whatever it was, it was meant for her. And yet she still hadn’t known what was causing it. Why was it there, why did it hurt her, why did it want so badly to fill her with agony? Was it a warning, or a punishment? Was it the beginning of something? And so, over the last hour, through her walking, her kneeling, her curling up into a ball and rocking back and forth and screaming until her lungs were crippled and sore and deflated, nothing she had done had told her why it was there, why whatever the hell was happening was happening, and thusly the all-devouring pain in her head had become the pain of not knowing.
Just then, as the woman at the table thought about this, a tall man strode into the room. His deeply tanned skin was the same color as the unpleasant beige wall behind him, so he looked oddly like a chameleon, except he had salt-and-pepper hair and a suit. Madeline was afraid of him. That’s because she remembered him from somewhere. She couldn’t remember where, but she reminded her of a night, somewhere in the distant past. She remembered him from this evening, too. She remembered him that moment when she had stood there over her boyfriend’s leaking corpse. The phone had lain on the floor underneath a cabinet outcropping, its battery compartment smashed open from being dropped. The policeman—yes, that was who he was—she had dialed him: he had been the one they had sent to help her, those exhausted, abraisive voices on the other end of 9-1-1. He had been there in the room with her, been expected to bring comfort, but he had just stood in the doorway, holding up a white light that was bright in her eyes; for a moment that was all she had seen, that was all he had been to her, a bright white light in the distance because her old life was gone. And looking at the disgusting scene, staring at the dead body’s fluids leaking all over the floor, he hadn’t rushed to help, or cried out, or helped her to a chair to ease the shock, he had just stared at her as she gripped her head and keeled over in agony. And then he had said, Come with me, Miss. He had done that, too, and he had walked her to the squad car as time started to slow for her. She had kept up hope, all through that infinite walk, a hope that she would be helped, that she would be considered a witness, not a suspect, all the way on that long walk until the tall man had overtightened metal cuffs on her sore wrists and forced her into the back.
“Hello,” the cop that was standing over her now drawled, smiling. His tone was saccharine and forged, like the taste of frosting with way too much dye. He had changed out from his uniform, probably because the girl at the table had gotten blood all over it.
Madeline didn’t like the man. He made her afraid, so very afraid that all she saw of him when she looked into his pointed face was the man who had stood over her as she had suffered. Looking up, Eisman studied the walls of the small room; she wanted a distraction. They were colored a sad and disgusting beige-yellow, textured oddly, and had “No Smoking” painted in small, business-like letters that were straight and level. The ceiling and floor were nothing but cement. There were the mirror to her left and the table in front of her, but they were reflective, and so as she studied them all she saw were her face and the sad brown walls, all she saw was lonely terror. And as she stared at her helpless green eyes, there was nothing here to distract her from the pain in her head and her arms and her mind. She sat up, straightening her neck, and then she arched her her back, which it crackled loudly as she stretched it out from the long minutes she had spent bent over her face in the table.
The officer was a tall man in a businesslike suit, so when she looked up at him, all Madeline saw were his legs, like she was a four-year-old kid in a room with angry parents. His posture was straight, and his face pointed and her eyes were blue. He made the woman shiver. “Hello,” she replied, unable to control the visible shuddering.
“May I ask your name?”
“Madeline Eisman.”
“Well, Ms. Eisman, you and I are going to have a little talk.”
“Okay.” Her voice was small and timid. It squeaked like a mouse underfoot.
“Well, Ms. Eisman, what I need from you is a detailed account of everything you saw tonight.”
“Where should I start?” She looked up at the tall man’s cold eyes. So much had happened to her, so much had changed, that she didn’t even know.
“The beginning would be nice.” He spoke with a grimace, and his voice dropped the feigned air of sweetness at this point. Something about the girl he saw before him made him angry. Maybe it was the way she looked, so… wild. “And remember: it is very important that you tell me the truth about what the hell is going on here—” He slammed his hand down on the table in front of her as he spoke, and leaned forward towards her—“because from what we’ve heard so far, it looks like we have plenty enough evidence to close this case and put you away for a long, long time.” Madeline’s headache surged with each word.
“So that’s it, then. I’m not a witness, I’m a suspect.” She supposed she could have gathered that from the fact that she was sitting in an interrogation room, and from the fact that she had been handcuffed, and the fact that she had been found over the body, covered in the victim’s blood and fingerprints, with a death grip on the murder weapon. But she had been in such terror that the only way for her mind to preserve itself was to be in denial. She couldn’t do that anymore, though; the huge man had just said it. And so she began to transform, as any means of comforting herself whatsoever faded from Madeline’s mind. She could no longer keep herself sane, the waves of shock and terror were so great…
“I want a lawyer,” she said.
But she didn’t want a lawyer. She didn’t want to help with the investigation, and she didn’t want to help at all. She just wanted to go home.