*
I woke up. I checked my messages. There was still nothing from GP&A about what my work duties would be. It wasn’t too early in the morning, so I called Penelope. She didn’t answer, and I got her voicemail. Because by the time she got the message Dr. Boggs would already have talked with her and got the Psylocybin issue sorted out, I risked mentioning the cameras again and apologized for mentioning them the night before and upsetting her. I ended the message by saying I’d like to see her again and asking her to call me.
I took my Psylocybin. Feeling the two little pills go down my throat was a pleasant experience every time; it was as if I could feel my mind calming down even before the regulating chemicals had entered my bloodstream. Every morning and night as I had taken them since leaving Maple Ridge, I was reminded that my life was now forever changed. No longer was I haunted by the poltergeist of paranoia. I was already starting to have normal social relationships possibly including a girlfriend, I’d held a steady job for three days, and I’d only nearly beaten a child in the street with a stick one time. It was like being a regular person.
Since I didn’t have any work to do, I called Winslow to see if he wanted to come over. He did. I read the letters to the editor section of the newspaper while I waited for him to arrive. Yennifer Stroumph had written in to complain about the new traffic cameras which had been installed on the main street, saying she wanted to be able to drive to work without being watched, and besides that, who was to say that the cameras wouldn’t be used for something else, like license plate tracking. Someone else had written to say that it was a great idea to reduce traffic accidents and catch criminals, that rumors about license plate tracking were nothing but alarmist claptrap, and if you didn’t want to be watched you were welcome to stay in the privacy of your own home where there were no cameras. I agreed with the second letter more; if Ms. Stroumph had nothing to hide then she had nothing to fear, as I knew more than most because of the camera in my kitchen which watched me while I read.
The doorbell rang. Winslow and I sat in the living room and talked; he was happy to hear I was getting on well with my family, and I was happy to tell him that only hours before I had been lips-to-lips with Penelope. It may have sounded like bragging, and that’s because it was. I didn’t feel too bad about it though, because I felt I had reason to brag since only weeks before I was weeping in the corner of a room in a mental hospital’s security wing, barely able to feed myself or pee outside my pants (“barely” is actually an overstatement of my abilities at the time), and now I was in the middle of what could be the start of a happy relationship with a beautiful woman, and she was only a little mentally unstable. I also left out the fact that she had pushed me out of her house and locked the door on me afterwards; such details often spoil a good story.
As seemed to happen with everyone in my house, Winslow became curious about the camera in my living room.
“So you’re telling me right now we’re being watched?” he asked, when I explained.
“It’s hard to say, exactly. There are three cameras in my home,” Winslow’s eyebrows went up when I said that, “and probably other GP&A employees who work from home also have cameras in their houses, and I don’t know if all the cameras are being watched all the time. At any time, they could be watching, though, which keeps me on my best behavior regarding work.”
“You aren’t actually doing any work, though,” he pointed out. “They also haven’t told you what you’re doing. It’s like you’re being watched just for the sake of the watching.”
“It makes me feel nervous,” he said. “I can’t believe it doesn’t make you feel nervous, Oscar. A few months ago you’d stand to the side at the ATM so the camera there couldn’t see you, now you have cameras all over the place in your home.”
“They’re not all over the place,” I said. “I have five rooms, and the cameras are only in three of them. If it would make you feel better, we can go into the bathroom and talk.”
“It’s not about what room we’re in,” he said, standing in the shower. “It’s the principle. You’re being watched in your own home, by you-don’t-know-who.”
“You don’t know who either,” I said. “What if it’s someone nice?”
“It’s probably not anyone nice. Your grandmother isn’t watching you from across town while she bakes cookies. Look, Oscar, I’m really very happy that you aren’t paranoid anymore. It’s fantastic being able to have a conversation and a glass of wine with you where you don’t accuse me of poisoning your glass, but I also think you’re taking it too far. Some caution can be good.”
I decided that I should cover the cameras up with some kind of wall decoration to make them look not like cameras, and then I wouldn’t have to deal with everyone asking me questions about them for the rest of my life. Maybe I could sew one of them inside a teddy bear and have the lens looking out through one of his eyes.
“You should look into GP&A,” Winslow said. “What do you really know about them? You should find out who runs the company, maybe it’s someone who has something against you.”
“Who would possibly have anything against me?” I asked. “I’ve never hurt anyone.”
“Never? How about the man you stalked and killed, the man in the cat’s paw print pajamas, remember? The thing that started all of this?”
“Don’t talk to me about that.” I stood up from the toilet. “I didn’t do it.”
“What do you mean, you didn’t do it? You went to jail because of it.”
“It wasn’t me, though, I’m different now.”
“But it still happened. Even if you’re different now, nobody else will know that. As far as they’re concerned, you’re a murderer.”
“I don’t want to talk about this, Winslow,” I said.
Then I think he said, “You can’t just ignore me,” but it was hard to hear for sure over the sound of the hair dryer and sink taps that I had turned on.
The inner corners of his eyebrows turned slightly inwards and upwards in a sad expression, and it was more than I could take. I sighed and turned off the noisy things.
“Please don’t shut me out again,” he said, quietly.
“I’m sorry, Winslow. It’s just very hard for me to talk about.”
“You can tell me,” he said, with his eyebrows now being flat and raised upwards across their length, inviting me to talk. Winslow’s eyebrows had an incredible talent for convincing me.
“I know I killed that man,” I said. “Everyone says I’ve changed, but what hasn’t changed is the feeling that I wanted to kill him. I think if it happened all over again that I would kill him again. It’s not just that man’s associates who think I’m a murderer.”
I paused, and took a breath. I felt very tired.
“I feel like a murderer myself.”
“Oscar… I didn’t realize. You acted almost like you hadn’t given it another thought. I’m sorry I brought it up.”
“I’ve thought about it a lot, Winslow. I feel tired now. We can talk about it another day.”
He left, after I assured him that I would be fine. I was going to be fine, but I did feel so tired. Admitting out loud that I truly felt as if I had killed that man and meant to do it had taken a lot of energy from me. How could I ever feel ok about it? And what must his family think of me? They probably wouldn’t even know that I had been released from prison.
I decided that I had to talk to them, to tell them about my mental condition and that I had received treatment for it, that I was no longer a danger to just any man leaving his house for work in the morning. I would also apologize for what I had done. I didn’t know if it could actually help them, but it did seem like the right thing to do. I didn’t feel suspicious of them as Winslow did, but I knew I should talk to them.
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today, I always say[34], so I got dressed in some going-out clothes and went directly to the house of the man who I had last seen in the gray pinstripe suit, stained red.
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The house looked the same as when I had been there last, which is what you would expect, but somehow it was unexpected, and I was surprised. I knocked on the door, but there was no response. I tried to look in through the windows in the front of the house, but the curtains were drawn. The front step of the house was dirty from months of rain splashing on the ground near it, and there were no footprints in the dirt, as if nobody had opened the door since that long-ago morning.
I walked around to the side of the house where I had hidden behind a bush months before, and saw that the curtains at that window weren’t closed properly, and one corner was lifted up, caught on a window ornament. I looked through and saw that the pans he had used while cooking dinner on that decisive night were still on the counter, apparently untouched. A spotlight-style bulb over the food preparation area was still burning. There was a layer of dust over everything, like nobody had been in the house for months. Wouldn’t his family have come to sort through his belongings? I wondered to myself. Or at least something should have happened. The electric company should have cut off the lights after months of unpaid bills. Who was still paying the bill? It wasn’t like my house where the insurance company took care of everything while I was in the hospital; here, the resident wasn’t coming back, and there was no need to keep the house in a similar and livable state for months.
I drove around for a while, not sure what to do. I had come to speak to his family, but his family wasn’t there, and didn’t appear to have been there at all. Closure was an important thing for me, or for them, I felt sure of it. I had seen it in movies. Cruising slowly in town, I drove past the Office of the County Clerk. I was a citizen of the county just like any other, and I decided to avail myself of my rights to public information.
Inside the office, there was a counter with a single window, and behind it stood a man. Behind the man stood stacks and file cabinets and shelves as far as the eye could see, which usually isn’t very far when you’re indoors. In this case it was only to the end wall of the building, about thirty feet away.
The man behind the counter, who I took to be the County Clerk advertised on the sign outside, was a heavyset man with taut suspenders that held up his stomach by way of holding up his pants. His stomach balanced delicately on his waistband and strained against his shirt, yearning for release. Below his large, round glasses, his eyes carried enough luggage for a fortnight’s holiday.
“Can ah help you, sir?” he asked, with a drawl you could spread on toast.
“I’m looking for any relations of a man who was killed a few months ago.”
“I can indeed help you then,” he said. “What was the name of the late gentleman?”
I hadn’t really thought this through. I didn’t even know the name of the man I had killed.
“Sir? His name? Or do you know what his address was?”
I did know the address, and I told him what it was. The gentle giant of the office lumbered off to locate property records. I waited for what I truly believe was three days, but there was no way to tell for sure because the drab interior walls held no clock, so it could have just as easily been three minutes.
When he returned, he slid a document through a slot at the bottom of the glass barrier over the counter.
“Mr. Ronald Smythson,” he said to me, tapping the name on the property tax form, although it was in print large enough that I could have seen it from across the room.
He lifted up a dog-eared phone book and dropped it onto the counter with a thud. “Now, sir, I know this book by heart, but I’ll go through it for your benefit. Let me warn you, though: you’re going to be disappointed.” He lifted the book ceremoniously into the air and felt along the ridges of the paper with his fingers. Without looking, he opened it directly to the ‘S’ pages and sat it back down on the counter. Then, without any sort of warning, he put his hands palm-down on both sides of the phone book and thrust himself forward, tilting his head and opening his eyes wide, while raising his eyebrows in a challenging manner.
I involuntarily took a step backwards, ready to defend myself or launch backwards through the door, but then I realized that as a county clerk you don’t get much chance to demonstrate your skills. He was simply showing off. I knew what he wanted. I brought my hands together several times, clapping. “Very impressive,” I said. “I don’t think I could do that.”
“You couldn’t,” he said, making a definitive statement as he leaned back and lowered himself flat onto his feet again. He had begun to perspire, and several drops had fallen on the phone book. He slid his finger down the pages and I followed the movement as he smeared his sweat on the paper. He went through several hundred Smunsons, and just when he was getting to the point where you thought there might be a Smythson, it turned into Smyles. There were no Smythsons.
“Maybe they’re unlisted,” I said.
“Sir,” the clerk lifted the waistband of his trousers up as if girding himself for combat, “this,” he held his hand above the book and then tapped all of his fingers downwards onto it, “is the county phone book. Nothing is unlisted for us.” He paused for a moment, and then said, with some finality, “Nothing.”
To demonstrate, he held the phone book in front of his face, this time by its spine. “Deedle deedle dee,” he said, tickling through the pages with his surprisingly nimble fingers. He looked at me from behind the phone book and opened his eyes wide with that challenging look again, while his lips pressed tightly together in concentration. He raised the phone book high in the air, flipped it over, and slammed it down to the counter. The page was open to ‘W’. I followed his finger again, and it led me directly to ‘Well, Oscar’.
“You’re an unlisted number, Oscar.”
“Alright,” I said, rather wishing to leave, “I get your point. If they’re not in that book, they don’t exist.”
“Exactly,” he replied. Then, after some consideration, “Or they don’t have phones. That could also be the case.”
“Can I take that paper with me?” I asked, indicating the property tax form.
“You can’t,” he said. “County property.”
“Thank you for your help, then.” I turned to leave.
“You can make a copy of it though, at the copy machine there.”
I closed the form under the lid of the copier and pressed the green diamond button that is the universal sign for ‘copy’. Nothing happened.
“It needs ten cents,” the clerk said. “On the wall,” he said, pointing to the coin slot next to the copy machine.
“Ten cents,” I said to myself, and searched through my pockets for a dime. Who carries a dime? “Can I borrow ten cents?” I asked, and turned to the clerk. Before I turned around he was already holding his hand out, palm up, with a shiny dime in it, and I suspected he had been that way even before I asked. He thrust his hand through the slot in the glass partition. I moved my hand to take the dime, and he closed his hand gently around mine. I tried to pull away, but his grip was stronger than you’d expect the grip of a county clerk to be.
“You have very soft hands,” he said. I managed to step back a little, which pulled him forward, but I couldn’t work my hand loose. The problem was that I was unwilling to let go of the dime from my fist. I needed that copy.
I stepped back further, and his face was now pressed against the inside of the glass so that it fogged with his breath when he said, “Y’all gonna have to work to earn that dime.”
He braced himself against the counter with his other arm and slowly pulled me back towards him, making my shoes squeak on the tiled floor. The veins on his hairy forearms stood out against the bulging muscles. His fingers stroked my wrist as he pulled me in. Now my hand was through the slot in the glass, and he began to breathe heavily. I unclenched my fist, and since my hand was slick with sweat because of the side effects of Psylocybin, it slipped easily from his grip. As my hand slid free, I snagged the coin using my fingertips. It fell onto the counter directly under the archway of the slot in
the glass and our eyes fell on top of it. I snatched it up before he could move. Both of us were breathing heavily, me from the effort, and he from… something else.
He wiped his sweaty brow and looked at me through the thick glass. Somehow, the way he watched me as I put the coin in the slot made me feel used. I pushed the copy button several times, eager to leave. My copy came out; I grabbed the warm paper, dropped the original onto the counter, and backed out of the office, still watching him as he panted behind the glass.
I drove away, checking my rear view mirror as I went. I halfway expected the county clerk to burst through the door in a shower of splinters and chase after me on a Segway. After several miles of driving and not being chased, I was able to relax and think. I looked at the copied paper in the passenger seat. I had sat it upright and buckled it in with the seat belt.
“He had no family in the tri-county area, and he apparently had no friends either,” I said aloud. “Yet his former house is being maintained. What does it mean?” I asked the paper. Mr. Ronald Smythson stared back at me.
To start, it meant that some weight had been lifted off my heart. If he had no family or friends, my mostly unintentional killing of him didn’t really affect anyone. Except him, of course; it had affected him in a quite severe manner. It was also sad, that a man was dead and nobody really cared, except me, the one who killed him. I hadn’t given any credit to Winslow’s theory about Mr. Ronald Smythson’s grieving relatives setting up GP&A as a shell company solely to watch me, but since there were no grieving relatives, or any relatives at all, I’d be able to put Winslow’s mind at ease about it. According to the county clerk, it meant that Ronald Smythson did not exist, and never had. Beyond that, I didn’t know what it meant. How I had killed a man who didn’t exist was certainly perplexing.
I drove under several traffic lights as I went, and I saw that they’d recently had cameras fitted on top of them. The cameras watched me as I drove under. They watched all the cars. It made me feel good that someone was keeping the traffic under control.
By the time I got home, it was late in the day. I called Penelope. Maybe she could make sense out of it or give me some idea of what to do next. I only got her voicemail, though, and she still hadn’t returned my earlier message. I knew she must have been home by then, so I thought perhaps the night before had been more upsetting for her than I had realized. Dr. Boggs must have talked with her at work as well, so she probably had a lot to think about. I decided to give her more time before I called again, and I didn’t leave another message.
I passed the time until bed by sewing the kitchen camera inside the body of a teddy bear like I had thought to do while Winslow was giving me a lecture on how terrible it was to have cameras in my house.