*
Later, I sat in my bedroom, looking at the wall. This was the sort of thing I knew people might call crazy, so I had my house locked up tight. I had my bedroom door locked too, so just in case somebody happened to drop by and peek in through the letterbox then the most they’d be able to do is look at the closed door to my bedroom and imagine that I might have the wall covered with pictures and notes relating to longer waits for tables at restaurants, gloves that shrank in the washing machine, missing juice, and all manner of inconvenience. They’d never know for sure, though, and no court could force me to testify against myself.
I looked at ‘Ron,’ represented by a crude drawing of a man in green. Since I felt he was at the center of it all, I had placed him literally at the center of it, in the middle of the wall with a circle drawn around him in red marker. It wasn’t my best idea to draw directly on the wall, but I could always put a poster up to cover the red circle later.
Around Ron I had taped pictures of orange juice, bus timetables, and my house keys which several days prior had not fit in the lock for a few seconds, so I had to jiggle them around a bit to get in. These were the things I felt for sure Ron was somehow involved with.
I only realized it after the orange juice incident, but when my keys wouldn’t fit in the lock I did get the feeling as if I was being watched, and the more I thought about it the more it seemed I was being watched by cruel eyes from behind dark glasses. Winslow might sometimes have felt as if his words fell on deaf ears, but I had taken what he said into consideration. It was true, coincidence does occur. The juice might have been coincidence. His car battery troubles might be coincidence. Any manner of things might be. How could my ill-fitting keys be something that just happened, though, without outside interference? Moreover, since the evidence convincingly showed that there was a third party involved, how could anyone have had access to my keys to alter them?
It would have to be a very fine, precise alteration; it couldn’t be so much that they wouldn’t work at all, but only just enough so they’d usually still work and would only occasionally stick for a moment making it so I’d have to turn them slightly one way and then slightly the other several times, with the whole world watching me, judging me as an idiot not able to get into his own house, hammering on the door and weeping with shame. I kept my keys next to the knife under my pillow at night, and in my zipped pocket during the day, there’s no way anybody would be able to get to them.
As I turned my brain upside down and shook it for a solution, I heard the mail dropping through the letterbox in my front door, and my mind made the connection. My business mail always came to my post office box, and when I last took my key ring out to open that, Ron or an accomplice must have taken my house keys, altered them, and replaced them while I was reading through my mail. I licked a stamp and stuck it near the drawing of Ron to remind myself of the new connection I had made, untaped my keys from the wall, and headed to the post office. Someone there would have seen what happened, and if not then I knew they had a security camera that was always watching from its perch in the corner of the ceiling and blinking redly at me.
At the post office I chose the shortest line, and immediately as I arrived in the line the clerk at the counter went into the back room to find stamps for the customer he was serving.
When he returned from the back room several minutes later and delivered the stamps, the clerk walked away from the counter, and, passing another clerk, said, “Going on lunch, the counter is all yours.”
“No problem, Ron, I gotcha,” came the reply from his colleague. The hair on my neck stood up; the clerk’s name was Ron, just like the stockboy who had removed my juice. He cast a backward glance at me as he donned his hat and exited the counter area. What could it mean? Where was he going? Were he and the Ron from the supermarket partners? Was he even now on his way to my house to look at my wall of information and glean what I had been able to piece together about their partnership while I stayed at the post office on a fool’s errand[3] of getting a surveillance tape that would be mysteriously missing or erased if they even allowed me access to it?
Never one to wait around and find out for sure when I could make a rash decision instead, I left the post office right away to follow Ron. I saw him hurrying away down the street; his hat marked him out among the crowd. He didn’t look back, and he walked with a limp, making him easy to follow.
When he got to my house, I planned to take him by surprise and force him to reveal his plan. The specifics weren’t quite clear in my mind, but I’d recently bought some things at the flea market which I was pretty sure were thumbscrews and I was eager to try them out. Instead of going down the street to my house, though, he passed it and carried on further away from town.
That was unexpected. Maybe he was going to meet the Ron from the supermarket. Or maybe he was going to pass a message on to someone, that’s how these things are done. Always through middlemen, with no faces seen and no names exchanged, only a whispered message or a scrap of paper slipped from one hand to another hand (a hand belonging to someone else, he wouldn’t just be juggling the paper around like some sort of clandestine jester[4]).
Ron passed a bus stop. There was a man waiting for the bus, huddled in the corner of the shelter, reading a newspaper with the collar of his heavy coat up around his neck. Was he huddled for warmth, or as protection against being identified? I looked again and saw that he was wearing dark glasses, as Ron at the supermarket had been.
Perhaps the message was to be exchanged here, so I walked fast to catch the whisper or snatch the paper as it was being passed. As I got closer, I noticed for the first time the gray hair under Ron’s hat. I had only seen him briefly in the post office so I hadn’t realized, but now I saw that he was an old man; the perfect cover, since nobody would suspect an old man of being involved in this cloak and letter opener game. As he walked past the man waiting for the bus, Ron tugged on his ear and sniffed. That was it; the signal sent, the message conveyed. But what did it mean? The bus pulled up and I had to make a decision; should I follow Ron, or should I go after the man in the heavy coat?
I thought quickly about the decision, which was made more difficult because I felt the beginning of one of my headaches. Suddenly, in my mind flashed a picture of the man waiting at the bus station meeting others in a dark, smoky room, huddled around a table covered with pictures of me. I knew he was the one, and I got on the bus after him.
The door to the bus closed as I settled into my seat. We drove past Ron and I got a clear look at his face. His eyes were tired and watery, and I knew I had made the right choice. He probably only wanted to finish his part of the mission and then go home to a dinner of Salisbury steak in front of a TV showing The Price is Right – the old British version hosted by Leslie Crowther, of course; this was a man with class, and I hoped that no harm would come to him when they realized it was due to his carelessness that I had found the man at the bus stop.
It was clear to me now that the Ron from the post office wasn’t the mastermind behind the plot against me, but the man in the coat on the bus was the link which would lead me to the anchor at the end of the chain. When I saw that he was looking straight ahead instead of reading his newspaper, I looked out the window and confirmed my suspicion that he had left his newspaper at the bus stop, proof that he was only posted there to receive a message and now he would be the one passing it on.
I kept a good watch on the man in the heavy coat. When he looked out the window, I looked out as well to see what he was looking at. When he napped, I napped. When he got off the bus, I got off the bus. When he went to his house, I went to his house. When he became part of a vast underground network dedicated to making my life and the lives of others less convenient for some as yet unknown reason… well, I had to draw the line somewhere. I made some plans to apply for membership, but without serious intent.
At his house, I crouched behind the evergreen bushes outside his living room, looking over the tops of
the leaves and watching him. So far, there had been nothing unusual to see. The man in the heavy coat, who was no longer the man in the heavy coat and was instead now the man in cats’ paw print pajamas, talked on the phone as he made his dinner. I imagined the things that he might be saying to whoever was on the other end of the line: passing on the information that I wasn’t in my house and that it was free for breaking in and ransacking; discussing why I had been at the post office and probably arriving at the conclusion that I must have figured out their plot to make my keys sometimes almost not quite fit in the lock; planning the next move, like replacing my mouse with one slightly less ergonomic so that after several years I would develop carpel tunnel syndrome and be unable to publish my findings on the internet[5].
After what he was saying to whoever, I imagined who that whoever might be. Could it be Ron from the supermarket? Ron from the post office? I even briefly entertained the outlandish notion that he might not be talking to anyone sinister at all, that he could be talking to a good friend and relating how pleased he was with the way his dinner was going – General Tso’s chicken[6] over a bed of white rice, which did look as if it was going to be delicious. I moved around the bushes and pressed my ear against the window to hear the conversation of the man in the pajamas.
“It’s turning out really well,” I heard him say. My heart beat faster; I now knew for sure that they were talking about me. He paused to listen to a question from the other end of the line and, with a laugh, replied, “Yes, it’s actually much easier than I expected it would be.”
I sat down below the window and leaned against the house to collect my thoughts. They were mocking me. I had thought I was figuring out their plan, perhaps even getting one step ahead, but apparently they considered their operation against me to be easy. Easier than expected even, maybe they’d done it to hundreds or thousands of people and they’d all put up more of a fight than me.
I felt ashamed that they felt they had so little to worry about from me, but I also felt my determination grow; I would get to the very core of their organization, the head of it, then I would get them to leave me alone and force them to set right all the slight wrongs they had done.
Determination and shame combined to make me warm, and I was tired from the chase earlier; I drifted off to sleep.
I dreamed of a giant red fist closing around me and squeezing me until I popped with a loud bang. I was suddenly conscious of a door slamming and my eyes opened wide to the bright light of the morning sun. I shut them immediately, because for some reason a hundred thousand years of evolution has still not properly equipped us for living on a planet which orbits an unimaginably huge ball of nuclear fire. My skull throbbed from a dream-induced headache.
I climbed to my feet and looked around the corner of the house. The man in the gray pinstripe suit had just closed his front door and was heading for his car.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to follow him in the car, so I stepped out from behind the wall without thinking. Then, with thinking, I thought what a stupid idea that had been. Now he would see me, he would know that I had followed him; he would report me, call his co-conspirators, and it would go beyond mere inconvenience – they would trap me, capture me, torture me, even kill me.
The cruel eyes of Ron from the supermarket seemed to be glaring at me from behind the surprised eyes of the man in the pinstripe suit as he saw me, a disheveled and unkempt man with sleep-heavy and bloodshot eyes, leaping from behind his house and staggering towards him.
“What do you want with me?” I shouted at him, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him even as I shook myself out of sleep. “All I want is peace, I want to be left alone with my own things and my own thoughts, like any man deserves!”
“I don’t know what——” he started, but the rest of what he said was cut off by a piercing increase in the pain of my headache and a powerful impression in my mind that this man meant to do me harm and would do it, incongruous as that may have seemed to anyone observing the situation and seeing who was shouting at who.
“Don’t spit your lies at me,” I said to him through teeth clenched against the pain of my headache. He tried to push me away, but I was stronger. I felt the blood pounding in my head and I exulted in the power I had over them as I held him in my grasp.
They had toyed with me. They had thought me impotent against them. They had mocked me, laughed at me, derided me and considered me low. They had experimented on me like a rat in a cage, but I was no longer blind to their experiments. I wasn’t content to press the lever and receive a treat any longer, I wasn’t going to scamper around and let the small inconveniences build up until they crushed me under their weight. At last I was fighting back, and he seemed shocked by it. What incredible naiveté he must have, I thought, to have not expected this would happen. Or maybe it was incredible confidence; perhaps he and his cohorts had been acting with impunity for decades or even longer. I had no way of knowing for sure how long they had been acting even in my own life.
He struggled more in my grip, trying to wriggle out of his coat, and I pushed him back towards his house. He tripped and fell, and I heard the knock of his head against the brick of the wall. I advanced, standing tall over him and blocking his escape.
I demanded answers from him, names and information, but he only gave me a blank stare. Then I saw the red stain smeared onto the wall where his head hat hit and spreading to the shoulders of his suit, and I stepped back. I had killed him. I looked around and saw for the first time the people on the street who had been watching us, all standing as if they were frozen.
“He’s been following me,” I said to the people around. “So I followed him, and watched him, and now… he fell…”
I turned to point to him to show them just what had happened, but everything went dark. The voices from the crowd sounded fuzzy, and far off. I stumbled in the darkness and fell to the ground. I hit my head, which is never pleasant, but you should’ve seen the other guy. Someone picked me up and carried me. Walls seemed to close in.
Eventually, I came out of the darkness. I was looking up at a fluorescent bulb on a concrete ceiling. When I sat up I saw that the walls which had closed in on me were the walls of a jail cell lined with bars.