I woke up on the eighth day after someone kidnapped Penelope and the police accused me of being the kidnapper, even though I was the one who reported the crime. On the first day, because Detective Bronson had not closed the door and neither had I, I woke up to find a squirrel on the couch next to me. When I moved my head, he looked at me, surprised to find out that I wasn’t dead after all, and scampered out the door. It was the second day after Penelope’s kidnapping before I collected enough energy to shut the door. It wasn’t because I minded anyone looking in, either, it was because there were two squirrels on that morning and I worried that the number might continue to double each day until after two weeks there would be eight thousand squirrels nesting on me.
Before I shut the door, on the first and second day, I could plainly see a police surveillance unit outside my house. It wasn’t marked, but the white van was still very out of place across the street. I was a nice fat suspect for them, and they weren’t going to let me out of their sight. It probably didn’t matter that I shut the door anyway; they likely had cameras that let them see my heat signature through the walls, so they’d know what I was doing.
I went to the bathroom to take my Psylocybin. I reached into the medicine cabinet for the bottle that said ‘O.R. WELL,’ and shook it. The meager rattling sound I got in return told me that not many pills were left; I estimated that I had used nearly a hundred so far. I took four pills from the bottom of the bottle. I had been taking a double – and sometimes triple – dose since Penelope’s kidnapping. I wasn’t paranoid, and that was an unhappy fact, because there was nothing I could do. But at the same time I worried that there was a real danger my amygdala could override the Psylocybin and give my paranoia an outlet, where it would manifest itself and latch onto someone innocent who I would suspect anyway. I wasn’t going to give it the chance, so I buried it under as much Psylocybin as I thought was safe. I’m not a doctor, so it probably wasn’t safe, but at least I hadn’t dropped dead after eight days of it, and my urine was a normal pale yellow. It did mean that I made my way to the bottom of the bottle faster than I would have otherwise. I didn’t think anything of it when the four pills I took that morning tasted slightly odd. I didn’t think of the long and mostly untested manufacturing process that pills go through, where perhaps a contaminant could be introduced, or the active ingredient wouldn’t get combined in the right percentage and render the pills ineffective. I thought maybe it was just something to do with eating too much cold food from a can. I brushed my teeth.
The extra dosage of Psylocybin combined with my depression over my helplessness regarding Penelope gave me an incredible lethargy. I had cut a head-sized hole in a sheet so I could wear it as a robe and not worry about changing clothes or washing clothes or unzipping my pants to pee. Eight days of scratchy beard grew out of my face. I gave the police surveillance team an easy time, because I never left my house. GP&A deposited my first check in my bank account, but they still had not given me any work to do. I assumed they still watched me on the cameras, so I was being watched from inside my house as well as outside. Maybe my job was to be a cam-guy for internet voyeurs to watch as I went about my daily business, and that’s why GP&A hadn’t yet told me. Maybe the customers who paid to watch me were sexually aroused by the fact that I didn’t even know it, like watching someone in the shower through a hole in the wall. I didn’t care, and I stood over the sink and let them watch me eat cold Chef Boyardee from a can for dinner. I licked my lips afterwards, for the cameras.