*
This was decidedly inconvenient. My body had chosen a terrible moment to betray me. My senses had deserted me and my locomotive control had left me at the precise moment when I needed to locomote. Now I was in jail. I had a lot of information to add to my wall at home after the previous day’s adventures, but that wall was outside of the jail, so I had no way to get to it. Nobody would even give me orange juice.
Winslow visited me on the first day, which I was informed of by a guard coming to my cell and announcing, “Visitor,” and motioning for me to follow him.
The visiting room was the kind where they separated you from your visitors by thick plastic and you had to talk to them through a phone even though you’re several inches away, which I thought must have taken some incredible marketing gymnastics from the phone company to convince the prison administration it was necessary.
I grinned triumphantly at Winslow and said, “I guess you’ve reconsidered what you said yesterday now, haven’t you?”
He looked a little taken aback, like perhaps he was reconsidering his reconsideration. “Oscar, do you know what you did?” he asked.
“I know what they want everyone to think I did. Even I thought I did it at first.” I’d had time to think about it quite a lot, since jail cells weren’t particularly busy places.
“It was very convincing,” I said, “with the hollow sound of his head hitting the wall – that was actually my first clue to the deception, since obviously heads aren’t hollow – and the little smear of blood, which was a nice touch, but all it took was a few ketchup packets taped to the back of his head.”
Winslow closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. His eyebrows were sympathetic to the task, and bunched in close together over his fingers. He wasn’t ready to admit I was right, so I continued.
“Don’t you see? I was this close to discovering the nature of their organization,” I said, and made a gesture in the air with my own thumb and forefinger indicating a very small distance indeed, “and they got scared. They’d tried to shut me up with the threat of me not being able to get into my house occasionally and very briefly, and of course the implied threat that in the future one of my boots might turn up smaller than the other boot in the pair.”
When he spoke, Winslow’s voice was calm and steady, though he kept his eyes closed and his fingers pinched to the bridge of his nose. “I don’t think you understand. You killed a man. I saw the corpse being taken away; they hadn’t yet covered his face and it was as white as the sheet over his body.” He opened his eyes, and they glistened in the fluorescent light. “That man is in the morgue right now. They don’t take you there unless you’re dead. You haven’t really started back on your medicine, have you?”
“I haven’t, and I won’t,” I said, raising my voice. “I threw them in the trash. I was only able to penetrate this far towards the center of their circle because my head was clear. I followed one of them from the post office on the lunch break because his name was Ron like the man in the supermarket who stole my juice, and he led me to another man who I knew was in with it all because of his heavy coat, then I realized that Ron from the post office wasn’t very high up and also the man in the heavy coat left his paper at the bus stop; I saw him in some kind of meeting about me in a dark room and later he changed into pajamas with cat prints on them – I saw because I watched him through his window.” I had got up off the stool and now stood over Winslow, looking down on him through the plastic divider. “He talked on the phone and I couldn’t hear most of the conversation but his lips were practically dripping glee about all the things they’d done to me, then he tried to escape while I was still asleep and I only grabbed him to get him to help me find the next man and I pushed him a little, only a little, so I know he couldn’t be dead.”
“They planned it all out,” I went on, after a brief pause for breath, “they must have had someone following me while I was following him, and probably someone following the man following me so they could rub him out if it all went south, or maybe just to tie up loose ends. Then they saw me asleep in the bushes and told the man in the gray pinstripe suit to put the bag of ketchup in his hair, close his door loud enough to wake me up, and then provoke me to violence by acting confused and frightened when I confronted him.” I knew I was talking fast, and perhaps saying too much for Winslow to take in all at once, but I couldn’t slow down until I had said it all. “Then he’d pretend to trip, pretend to hit his head, and pretend to be dead long enough for me to be put in jail. The investigation will sort it all out once they realize his body has hopped off the morgue table and left town, but of course it’ll take weeks for me to be cleared because of all the witnesses, including you, who think they saw me kill a man, so by then the whole crew will have regrouped with different names and different faces, and all my work in tracking them down will be for nothing.” I stopped talking and returned to active respiration.
I needn’t have worried about Winslow’s understanding. He opened his eyes and I saw that he had tears in them because he was so moved by my thorough investigation into and passionate explanation of the workings of this shady gang, and by my modesty and good-heartedness because I hadn’t even reprimanded him for being such a fool and falling for their simple tricks.
I was about to comfort him and tell him it was all right, they were very clever and he didn’t have the same information I had, when I became aware of a little noise from my phone handset, like a click or maybe a buzz. That noise had been there all along, but I realized, too late, why prison visits included phones even though you were only inches apart: the whole conversation was being recorded, maybe it was even being listened to right now. Winslow, by being concerned for me, had unwittingly caused me to open up to him and reveal everything I knew to the people listening in. Now it would all change; they wouldn’t just have different names and different faces, but they would also have different hats; maybe they would be disguised as shrubbery, which would make hiding behind shrubbery very risky for me.
“So, as I was saying, I’m sure this will all be over with soon, and there’s no reason for me to continue trying to uncover any secret organization which doesn’t exist,” I said loudly into the mouthpiece. “Ha ha, what was I thinking, sleeping in bushes and following elderly postal employees on their lunch break? I guess you’re right, maybe I have been working too hard, and I did forget to take my medication once or twice, I’ll be sure to take it every day now, I surely will. Alright, well I’ve got to go now; I have a whole wall in my cell where I haven’t counted the blocks yet. It was nice speaking with you.”
I returned the handset to the wall cradle and winked at Winslow, who was still holding his handset and had forgotten to close his mouth after having been amazed at my cleverness and sharp mind which led me to discovering that they were monitoring our conversation.
I had forgotten that the visiting area was sealed on both sides by a door which was only unlocked after the visitation period of an hour was over, and on my side there was a guard who didn’t look like he was going to bend any rules for me, so I settled down to wait. Winslow talked to the guard on his side, pointing to me and looking worried. I waved to them and smiled, to show that I didn’t mind waiting and there was nothing to worry about. Winslow took a prescription pill bottle out of his pocket and offered it to the guard – maybe the guard had a headache, Winslow was always very considerate – but he must have changed his mind about needing the pills right then because he just nodded to Winslow and put the bottle in his pocket.
Back in my cell, I sat down to think. I had figured out they were listening on the phone, but not before I told Winslow things I knew about them and how I had tracked them down the day before. They might have been thrown off by me ending the phone conversation and pretending that I agreed with Winslow, but they would probably change the way they operated just to be sure. Men waiting at bus stops would no longer leave their newspapers behind, and messenge
rs would be sure they were not followed when they left the post office.
The changes would make it more difficult to track them, but after having done it already I felt pretty sure I could do it again; I would recognize the man in cats’ paw print pajamas even if he changed his disguise to dogs’ paw print pajamas. And the next time I would change my methods as well, I would be more careful. I wouldn’t fall asleep in bushes, for one thing. Or at least I would have a blanket with me if I did, and some coffee for in the morning, so I wouldn’t be so easily framed for a fake murder. Planning, that was the key.
Several times each day, I would have visitors directly in the cell. At first they were men in suits with names like Brown or Johnson, asking me questions about what I had done. Since it had mostly all been recorded already when I was walking to Winslow, I told them a lot of things.
After a few days it seemed like they weren’t really taking what I said seriously (‘But then – let me be clear – the keys did fit?’), and shook their heads in a way I didn’t appreciate when they took notes in their little notebooks, so I stopped answering their questions; then the men in suits stopped coming, and nobody came for a week. I knew it was a week because I’d carved the days into the wall, like I knew you were supposed to do in jail. That is, I tried to, except it’s actually quite hard to carve anything substantial into a metal wall, so I gave in after a few minutes and just used the actual calendar the county jail administration produced, and marked off the days using a marker they provided as well. This lessened the dramatic incarceration atmosphere somewhat.
On the seventh day with no visitors, a female nurse came to check my pulse, take a sample of my blood, and ask me a few questions about my medical history. I sort of objected at first, but she was much more pleasant than the men in suits, so I only objected in a routine kind of way like I thought might be expected of me; I didn’t want to appear easy.
Different doctors visited me, checking my eyes, poking in my ears, and sometimes asking me questions such as, “When was the first time, as an adult, that you cowered under a blanket for no discernible reason?” They seemed pleased with the results of their poking and questioning. One of them said that my condition was unique, and that I would be out of there in no time at all, which was exactly what I had been telling Winslow.