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God loves you like dogs love you, but it’s easier to love a dog.
Dogs aren’t so remote, for one thing. You can stick your fingers in a dog’s hair, bury your nose in his fur and breathe in the scent of sweat and dust. The distinctive smell of unwashed dog is practically Pavlovian for him at this point. His last girlfriend (and hadn’t that been forever ago) had complained. Why did he have so many dogs and wasn’t he fed up with all the shedding? The drool and muddy paw prints of it all? But Will’s never been able to find it anything but comforting. She hadn’t, so she’d left, and the dogs are still here, so.
Dogs are there. A dog is there when you’re puking your guts up in the bathroom for the third night running. When you haven’t eaten anything that wasn’t either whiskey or coffee for the last three days and the stitches holding your guts together ache with every jerky movement that pulls them to their limit. A dog comes to lick your face, to whine softly and paw at your hand with too-long nails that raise weals on your skin (”sorry, baby, I’ll take care of you in the morning, I promise”).
Dogs are there, and where is God?
God certainly isn’t there in the courtroom where Will has to sit in the witness stand when he’s called to testify by the prosecution. If there’s a God here, he’s six foot nothing and staring at Will with a gentle, curious expression on his face. Hannibal doesn’t take his eyes off Will for a second. Will makes eye contact only once. He has to, though it makes him flinch back like he’s touched a live wire. It sends the same amount of current through his body, electrifying and deadly.
Will looks at the prosecutor asking him all the wrong questions, drawing all the wrong conclusions. He can’t help but feel annoyed at the unholy crime of blasphemy.
Hannibal is a monster; of course he is. Unlike all the other banal and cruel men Will has spent his life becoming, Hannibal actually deserves the title. He’s earned it. It irritates him on a subcutaneous level that these people who don’t understand are trying to strip it away.
“How do you know Hannibal Lecter?” The prosecutor is a well-dressed man in his forties—handsome, sandy blond hair, square-jawed with a dimple in his chin. Will immediately dislikes him.
“He was my psychiatrist. Unofficially. I was referred to him by Jack Crawford after I shot a suspect in the line of duty.”
Mr. Square Jaw elides the fact that Will shot someone, but Will’s sure that Hannibal’s defense attorney won’t. He isn’t the same lawyer that defended Will once upon a time, but he might as well be. There’s an undeniable similarity between the two, a kind of insouciant competence that slicks itself over everything. He’ll do a good job, Will knows. Hannibal probably picked him out well in advance, anticipating a day when he’d need such a contingency.
Will imagines him sitting at his desk in the office he used to keep right here in Baltimore, scrolling through potential candidates, perhaps placing a few calls to get a feel for them over the phone until he found just the right one. Will likes this lawyer. It’s someone he would have chosen, in Hannibal’s shoes, but his own history and sanity aren’t on trial for once.
That should feel like something. Justice, maybe. Vengeance, probably. Seeing Hannibal in the hot seat, sitting where Will once sat in a courtroom just like this one—it seems like it should feel good. If Will took any pleasure in any of this, it would be a sign of a just universe—that maybe there is a God, and He loves them after all, but Will just feels fucking tired.
He has an unpleasant sense of vertigo. Seeing Hannibal sitting there smiling at him feels like watching the world flipped in a funhouse mirror, a little nauseating and not actually fun at all.
The prosecutor is still talking.
“You made it a point to indicate that your doctor-patient relationship with the defendant was unofficial. Why is that?”
“Because that’s what happened,” Will says, and it’s an effort to keep the sarcasm out of his mouth. “If it were an official relationship, he wouldn’t have been able to report on me to Jack. This was important to everyone involved for their own reasons.” His lips twist in the bitterest smile, and he tastes Hannibal’s mouth in his when he says it: “We were just having conversations.”
He doesn’t look. He doesn’t want to look, but he still can’t miss the way Hannibal’s smile deepens at that. He tells himself this isn’t a private joke shared between the two of them, that he won’t turn this moment over and over in his head on whiskey-blurred nights. He tells himself a lot of things.
He snaps back to the present.
“Mr. Graham, how would you characterize the treatment you received while under Doctor Lecter’s care?”
“Unorthodox.”
“Please elaborate.”
He can feel a headache coming on and wishes he had aspirin, or a fifth of whiskey, or a concussion.
“He used psychic driving on me, induced seizures, withheld pertinent medical information that led to my hospitalization, and made me question my sanity on a daily basis.”
Mr. Square Jaw is unmoved. Of course he is—he’s well-prepared and he’d read Hannibal’s file. This is all just the tip of one very large, very fucked up iceberg. It’s press fodder, and Will refuses to give the Freddie Loundses of the world any more than they can scrounge up with their own poorly principled hands.
“Unorthodox seems a mild choice of words, in that case.”
“Objection.” Hannibal’s defense lawyer slides in, and the judge takes it home.
“Sustained.”
Will is saved from having to provide commentary on his own dubious choice of words, and he answers the prosecution’s remaining questions without embellishing. No one asks him how he feels about Hannibal, and it’s just as well. He isn’t sure himself, isn’t sure he’s ever known the answer to the question no one asks:
What is Hannibal Lecter to you?
Certainly not my friend, but not-a-friend covers a lot of ground, and their ground is consecrated because it’s a fucking graveyard planted with little dead girls and watered with blood. Even Will won’t dig up holy land. What God has joined together let no man put asunder.
Hannibal is led out of the courtroom with his hands cuffed behind his back, with chains dragging from his ankles.
Will is tired. He’s just really, really tired.
He keeps his head down and ducks camera flashes and reporters who want a statement. He no comments his way right out the courthouse and into his car. He slams the door and locks it and lets his head thump back against the headrest.
He breathes until he doesn’t feel like screaming, then he twists the key in the ignition until the engine turns over.
He drives toward home, toward his whiskey and his dogs. The headache that had threatened to break over him like a wave is raging full force behind his eyes, and the silence in the car is deafening.
This is when he would pray, Will thinks, if he were the praying type. This is when people pray.
He doesn’t pray. He’s afraid that if he tried, he’d hear the reply in a distinctly Lithuanian accent. There’s no God here anyway, just the rattle of his car along the road and the crackling static sound of the radio.