Blast from the Past # 2: Composite Drawing

This nearly 20-year-old bit of writing was done at a time when I wanted to experiment a bit with the form (an itch I just recently scratched again, with Skipped). In my younger years, I'd heard again and again about a Japanese movie called Roshamon that purportedly told the same story from multiple perspectives. Plus, as you'll learn below, I'd encountered another instance of perspective writing that caught my attention. Composite Drawing is the result.

By the way: In the ensuing years, not only did I finally get to see Roshamon, but also became a big fan of its legendary director, Akira Kurosawa. Vicki and I have seen most of his movies, and are always looking to catch the ones we've missed. Having said that, I'll admit to having been somewhat disappointed in the reality of Rashomon compared to what I'd imagined it to be. Not that I think Akira would've cared!


Composite Drawing

DETECTIVE SGT. ROBBINS (stranger): Case # 91032203 was an unpleasant way to start a day. For Case # 91032203, anyway. Me, I was ending my day; not a great one, but definitely better than his.

I arrived at the scene at 8:07 a.m., just as the lab boys were scraping up the last of him off the ground. Mr. Shawn Casey, age 28, deceased. Very deceased. I'd heard the 5-17 call over the car radio on my way home after working the eight-to-eighter, and couldn't resist the urge to stop by for a look-see. I guess I'm no different than anyone else... all those years of looking at mangled corpses hasn't done much to dull my morbid curiousity. Body splatters are a lot like snowflakes; no two are quite the same.

Casey was the fourth pavement diver of the month, which meant that business was slow and likely to pick up soon. In over ten years of police work, I'd never known a month to go by with fewer than eight suicidal dives. Life in the big city.

I left the uniforms to their duties, and drove home to have a few drinks and then hit the hay. I knew I'd get the usual dirty looks from Maggie about the booze, but she had no idea. No idea at all.

A few days later, when Susie proudly showed me a finger painting of a butterfly that was still wet, I could see the chalk outline of Casey's smear superimposed over it. A perfect match. God works in mysterious ways.

The official report for Case # 91032203 eventually made it to my desk. Green and Winslow had done their usual half-assed job, but I couldn't argue with the bottom line: CAUSE OF DEATH - SUICIDE. In this business, you lose your virginity early. You learn that people will do anything for a buck, that the only perfect crime is the one someone else committed, and that nobody ever "falls" out of a 22nd floor window in the middle of the night. The report cited several of the people interviewed during the investigation as stating that they'd heard Casey at one time or another make statements such as "... sometimes I get so depressed that I think it'd just be simpler to end it all..." Half said they'd never taken it seriously, while the other half said they weren't at all surprised when they heard. Nice bunch, that. It must've been a great comfort to Casey to know that he had such warm, caring friends around him. Shit! I need a drink.


MANNY LESTER (co-worker): Yeah, I knew Casey pretty well. He was a buddy o' mine, ya know? Pretty heavy-duty dude. A compadre, capeesh? Blew me away when I heard. I mean, I never knew nobody who gacked themselves before, ya know? I wonder if, like, he screamed all the way down to the ground? Nah, the cops said his body'd been laying there, oozing into the ground, for, like, six or seven hours before they found it, so he must've gone down quiet like a lamb. Hey, what if he changed his mind halfway down... "Oh please, God, I didn't mean it... I was only kidding..." then SPLAT! And that's Casey all over!

Yeah, I knew Casey pretty well.


VALERIE CASEY THOMPSON (sister): Oh, God, I still can't believe he's gone! I don't want to believe it! What could've been upsetting him so much that he wouldn't be able to talk to me about it? I know we haven't been close over the last couple of years, but we're still brother and sister, for God's sake! He should've come to me. I'd've done anything for him, if only I'd known!

Was it some sort of delayed reaction to Mom and Dad's deaths? That was almost two years ago, though... we'd both had time to get over it. Or maybe he wasn't over it. But he always seemed so strong, so able to deal with whatever Life threw at him. What could've made him...

Oh, it could have been that witch he's been seeing, that Virginia bimbo! How a guy with as much going for him as Shawn could get mixed up with a married woman is beyond me. Maybe she finally broke his heart one time too many, and... Oh, Shawn, if that was it, she wasn't worth it! You were worth a hundred of her kind!

Oh, God, I miss him so much already!


IDA BARKLEY (next door neighbour): Bill and I are just sick about what happened to poor Mr. Casey last week! Just sick, I tell you! And the police are saying that he threw himself off his balcony. Can you imagine? Why, that's the very balcony that's joined to ours! In fact, that's how we met Mr. Casey, oh, it must be nearly two years ago now. You see, Ruffles, that's our cat, had this habit of climbing over the partition between our balconies, and then getting stuck over there. There's a ledge on our side, you see, but there isn't one on Mr. Casey's side, so poor Ruffles has nothing to climb up onto to get back here. Well, Mr. Casey, being a cat-lover, and I can always tell a cat-lover by the eyes, well, he would always hand Ruffles back over to us and we'd have a little chat. That's how we got to know Mr. Casey so well. Hardly a day'd go by that we wouldn't have at least one chat out on the balconies. Of course, in the winter, we wouldn't talk for as long, but in the summer....

I still can't believe that we won't be able to have any more nice chats with Mr. Casey. Now that I think of it, the last time I talked to him was the day before... his accident. Bill and I were leaving for Windsor the next day, and..oh my, and it was such a nice day, too, just perfect for a long drive. I remember we had the windows rolled down and Ruffles had his head stuck out the back window. The first nice day of the year. Such a sad thing Mr. Casey never saw it.

I don't suppose the new neighbour will be nearly as nice...


DR. STAN CONWAY (personal physician): Very messy bit of business, that Casey suicide. I would've thought that an educated man such as he would've chosen a more civilized means of ending it all. Pills, for example.

At any rate, it saved me having to deliver a bit of bad news. I always hate that part of the job, you know. If there was one aspect of the practice that I could get rid of, that would certainly be it. No one likes hearing that they have heart disease, no matter how much effort you put into breaking it to them gently and making sure they know all the surgical possibilities. People can actually be quite insensitive, sometimes.

I half-expected a visit from the police, after I heard about his death. Not that it really matters... as I hadn't had a chance to talk to Casey about the lab results before he died, that could hardly have figured into his death! Whatever it was that drove him over the edge, it wasn't medical!


VIRGINIA PLEASANCE (ex-girlfriend): How could he do this to me? I know he only did it so I'd feel guilty! He was always making me feel guilty! Was it my fault that I couldn't leave my husband? You'd certainly have thought so, listening to him tell it!

It couldn't have been my fault! We've broken up so many times over the last three years, he must've been used to it by now! In fact, he seemed to take it better each time it happened. He knew I loved him; he understood! So how could he do this to me?


THE AUTHOR (omniscient creator): I made up Shawn Casey. I dreamed him up, I dressed his bones in skin, and his skin in clothes, all for the express purpose of casting him off the balcony of his 22nd floor apartment to plummet to his death. But not out of cruelty.

I wanted to examine the question, "How well do we know each other?" My first attempt at this came in the form of imagining that a friend or family member of mine suddenly proclaimed that he/she were actually ___________. The idea would be to fill the blank with increasingly-mindboggling adjectives, and see how far I could take it before I reached a point where I could say, "Now that's just not true, and I know it!" So I started of lightly. My brother is telling me he's secretly been a member of the NDP party. Okay, that doesn't really surprise me at all. Now my best friend is proclaiming his latent homosexuality. That's a bit harder to swallow, but the story's entirely too familiar to be incredible. So then my aunt shocks the world by demonstrating herself to be a visitor from the planet Xandro, sent here 63 years ago to study our ways. Pretty unlikely, to be sure (she's never even learned to drive a car), but what could I really draw on to shake her story? I've known her 26 years now, but if I really think about it, she does get a little strange every now and then...

The above exercise convinced me that there was, indeed, something worth examining here (you may disagree, but try to remember: I'm easily entertained!) And I kept thinking about a scene from a movie that'd stuck in my mind much longer than the movie itself had: a character (we'll call him "John Smith" because that definitely wasn't his name) is talking about how his barber knows him as a slight wave, part on the left; the waiter at his favourite restaurant knows him as a big tipper; his butcher knows him as a chicken-and-roast-beef man; and so on, right through all of the people that he dealt with on a daily basis. So naturally the character wonders, if you put all of these people together in a room, could they create a composite picture of the total "John Smith", each one contributing that little bit of insight they held into "John" to the puzzle.

As the rest of the movie rolled on, my mind kept worrying that one idea over and over. I put myself in "Smith"'s place, trying to imagine what each of my acquaintances could contribute toward my composite drawing. And it was this train of thought that birthed the short story that you now hold in your hands.

Because, to be perfectly honest, I don't think people do know each other very well. I think most people are perfectly happy knowing just enough about those around them to be able to say, "Well, Frank's got a great sense of humour," or "Mary's strictly a loner!" As soon as we can safely "peg" a person, we're generally pretty happy to leave it at that.

This story is about "pegging" people. Every one of the characters who obliges us with a testimonial on the life and death of Shawn Casey is snug and secure in the knowledge that they know Casey. And, like the barber, and waiter, and butcher, they do know Casey. Or at least one or two aspects of the man. But if you put all of them together in a room and forced them to talk about Shawn Casey, here's what they just might come up with:


SHAWN CASEY (deceased): It wasn't the way I would've written my death scene if I'd been choreographing it, that's for sure!

It was around midnight, and I was just about to head for bed when I heard Ruffles, the cat from next door, out on my balcony. He has a habit of coming over and not being able to get back home. So I went out to try to get Ruffles back onto the Barkley's balcony so they wouldn't have to wake me up in the morning before leaving for Windsor. I climbed up onto the railing so I can drop him down on their side, and as I was climbing down I stepped down onto a patch of ice. My feet slipped out from under me, and I felt myself lurching over the the railing! My heart started going like crazy, so I guess I must've missed my grasp and gone over the edge. Pretty dumb way to die, huh?

And now I hear through the grapevine that people think I committed suicide. Just cuz the temperature rose, and the ice melted! And I guess they didn't do an autopsy, or they would've known about the heart attack. Then again, there probably wasn't much left to do an autopsy on! I used to get dizzy just looking down from that height!

It's funny the way Life goes, isn't it? Death's a lot less complicated!