About once a week, I have a little fantasy about Law & Order–well, “fantasy” isn’t quite the right word; this is far less hardcore than my Chris Meloni daydreams. We’ll call this a reverie.
In my reverie, I am the murder victim, and my body is discovered in the first minute of the show. Detectives Briscoe–I hope Dennis Farina can forgive me for going with Jerry Orbach in my reverie–and Green (or, if I was also raped and/or sexually mutilated, Detectives Benson and Stabler) will then spend the first half of the episode trying to find out who killed me.
So this is the question:
Who do they suspect?
There’s E.S., of course. My past behavior towards him would certainly have inclined a lesser man to homicide; who’s to say he didn’t discover evidence of a relapse? Then there’s E.S.’s ex-boyfriend, who hates my guts anyway. One of my students? One of the gay cheerleaders? Or perhaps a criminal unconnected to me who killed me because I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?
The police would of course discover this blog and search it–and the comments–for clues. After expressing Carson-Kressley-like horror at the mess that is my apartment, they would find my porn stash, which might or might not give them any new leads.
I guess the question underneath all these other questions is: are the secrets I keep that I think are interesting the secrets that are actually interesting?
And what about the secrets that I’m not even conscious of keeping secret? What about the small things, the little embarrassments and vast shames, to whose suppression I have become so habituated that they don’t even register on my conversational topics radar?
The most entertaining finale I’ve come up with so far, by the way, is the discovery (almost certainly by Sam Waterston) that E.S. convinced one of his patients to kill me once (s)he was discharged from the psych ward in the hospital.
Though I’ve shared the reverie with him, I haven’t told him about this ending.
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