A talent agent, Richard Heywood had begun to despise entertainment parlance. The repulsion was physical. When he engaged in business dialog, he sometimes felt an urge to throw coffee in the client’s face. Within a few years his speech became desultory. He would blurt sentences and sentence fragments. Once when an intellectual property attorney asked a question about a contract, he blurted, as if under threat of bomb fire: “It’s five o’clock in the morning! It’s five o’clock in the morning!”
“It’s five o’clock in the morning!” had been the frequent ejaculation of a woman who’d occupied the adjacent apartment of a boarding house where he’d lived for a while in Pittsburgh during his twenties. At five o’clock in the morning, the woman would loudly announce the time repeatedly, until pounding on the walls would intimidate or drown her out. But now it had been a quarter past three in the afternoon in Southern California.
Worse, he soon expressed his growing defiance in less confusing terms.
Arlene was a handsomely outfitted booking agent who took a number of his acts. He was to meet her for lunch. She was late. He didn’t particularly care that Arlene was late. In fact, he hoped she wouldn’t show up. He let people ahead in the line for tables. Compared with his mind-state, the people in the restaurant seemed involved in something like a cartoon. The cartoon was not altogether harmless, however. The fakeness menaced him because everyone else took it for real. He listened to bits of conversation. All the language was pre- fabricated, like modular homes. He felt the urge to interrupt and obliterate the sounds with a protest of incoherent morphemes.
He had begun to consider a method of escape from these difficulties, although they weren’t really difficulties as such. They were more like a tincturing of his mind. Seemingly ineradicable, yes, but intangible, like intellectual property. He did have obligations, a wife and three kids, but these weren’t the problem exactly – although otherwise he could have just walked away and become just another babbling lunatic mendicant. As a bum the inapt phrases wouldn’t be out of place. For him they were an occupational hazard. But he couldn’t be a bum just yet. He had things to work out first.
Arlene finally showed. The host led them to a table. Arlene was loaded with the accouterments of business. She put things down without much thought – keys, cell phone, pen and tablet – throwing them on the table. He felt sad for the things, the way she treated them. She spoke all the while. The words were apparently meant to deflect attention from her obvious vulgarity. But words made her more vulgar, he thought. She had no respect for words, treating them like commonplace verbal rubbish. She masticated while speaking, with saliva and relish. He was disgusted.
“I need something crazy,” Arlene said. He thought she was talking about him. She said she needed an act, a comedian for some show.
He knew many, but he couldn’t think about it now.
“No.”
“Like a Jerry Boswell with a Tom Fink twist. What do you mean ‘No?’ But not quite, I can’t put my finger on it. Something new, different. Not just the same old stuff. Know what I mean, not like just crazy antics but maybe some message in the humor. If he’s not out there we’ll create him. I just can’t put my finger on it. I hate that. I know what I mean. I know what I’m looking for. I’d know it if I saw it.”
“Yes.”
“I knew you’d know what I mean. If anybody’d know, I knew you would.”
“No.”
This was the way he’d been conducting business for weeks now. He wasn’t listening at all and had no intentions of taking any action on any answers. He was just trying to get through each conversation, as if only getting through the conversations was an accomplishment. He simply said “yes” or “no” arbitrarily.
“Of course not,” she said.
“No.”
“Definitely not,” she confirmed.
The ice clinking in the water glasses, the sound of forks and knives on porcelain, the excessive ministrations of the waiter, the useless exchange of words – all these were excruciatingly painful to him.
“You’re driving a hard bargain these days. How is your family?”
“Yes.”
“What have you been doing with yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Have any vacations planned?”
“Yes.”
“We’re going to Spain. Have you ever been? I’ve heard it’s gorgeous.”
“No.”
“Maybe France? Paris?”
“No.”
Arlene cross-referenced everything, looking for a hook on him.
“You get the gist of what I’m saying, it’s kind of like this ‘Yes-No’ thing of yours, like ‘No’ to everything. Like ‘No’ to oil spills. Like ‘No’ to the ozone layer. That’s what I’m looking for here,” Arlene went back to business. “Like the ‘No’ comedian. The guy with the ‘No’ attitude, but the ‘No’ is kinda like … in a ‘Yes’ framework. Like he’s really a ‘Yes’ man. But really what it comes down to is somebody getting up there and slamming everything, gently … and like he’s unconventional but with a license to be unconventional. You know. If anyone in this business knows, you do.”
He’d heard nothing but a droning sound. Arlene might as well have been an insect. Her prolixity was like a cricket tweaking. What was her being for? he thought, distractedly.
“Arlene, this is all so embarrassing to me. Please, please, spare me this ignominy,” he said, underlining that word to hopefully extricate himself from the air filthy with catch phrases. “You make me sick.”
He said this more imploringly than harshly. Then he returned his face to its previous expression, hardly realizing that he’d spoken. It was as if an outside force had spoken through him, because he had no recollection of speaking the words. They were supplied.
Arlene’s face contorted in obvious pain. But it wasn’t so much the pain of insult as of being struck by some alien thing on the side of her head. It was a hint of a strange and negative universe, crawling with perverse, chaotic monsters, opening its jowls before her mind’s eye.
“Arlene,” he heard the voice saying then, “do you know where I might get hold of a large sum of money, quickly? … There’s a mind that’s working, but it has no interest in this empirical realm, which is regarded as inviolate. It has no interest in body language, in the feeding-and-being-fed mind. The eater. The waiter. The candle-stick-maker.”
He became aware of a strange odor emanating from his body. It was the same smell that comes from bums. But it wasn’t the small of garbage cans. It was the smell of his unconscious. It leaked the acrid air of barnyards, alleys, junkyards, fens, and the musty garages of his childhood, making their way into the thin afternoon light.
“You’re on a another planet. You’re fucking insane. But that doesn’t give you the right to insult me? Who do you think you are?”
Arlene got up and left the table. She had looked and spoken very painfully, but he didn’t recognize her any longer. She seemed to be some animated machinery with words coming out of it. What ridiculous microchip soul propelled her, and why?
He went back to his office. He played with some pencils. He was dazed, but not by Arlene. He fell asleep at his desk and dreamt about being aboard a big cruise ship flying through the sky. All the Power People were there, and everything implied that he shouldn’t be, that he didn’t belong, because he hadn’t taken the Power seriously enough, as if it weren’t real. But if it was real, the dream was to prove it, not by words, but by an ethereal force of the magnitude and consequence of the Almighty. The dream had already convicted him of the crime he was about to commit against the Power. Arlene and the other angels who were in the good favor of the Power kept admonishing him: He was a terrible wrongdoer. That was the tone.
The next few days he began thinking of ways to get the money. He looked through his bank statements to see how he’d received large sums. As an agent, money was often transferred to his account in down payments for talent performances. Part was his commission, ten to fifteen percent. When the money was in his account, he thought, all he would have to do was withdraw it, all of it, and leave. And what would he do when the client asked for the money? He’d tell them he hadn’t gotten it yet. What was $200,000 compared to the national debt? Compared to what these asses make in a year? He had to keep in mind that this was just a restaurant tip and no one would miss it, or care. It was some peoples’ weekend expense money. The local Boy Scout troop had a larger annual budget. And so on.
A few days later he telephoned Arlene.
“Yes, I think I have that act you’re looking for … the comedian. Yeah, well, I’ve been thinking, there’s a guy doing the local club scene; I think he’s perfect for what yo want.” Somehow he had mustered some cogency.
“Well I’m glad you’ve decided to play ball, Richard. Really it’s about time. Don’t think we all haven’t noticed how crazy you’ve been acting. But it’s all right. I’m glad you’re back. Let’s get this thing together.”
He thought he heard some trace of pity in her voice, which made him furious.
“But I need a bigger commitment, Arlene,” he went on. “I need an advance on several acts. Promise me that you’ll continue to work with me. I don’t have an ulterior motive. I wouldn’t rob you. I just need insurance. I need a conviction. Please work with me here. I need help.”
He pled and the pleas were pathetically incongruous and undermining of his argument. He continued, involuntarily multiplying misstatements, but he couldn’t help it.
However, he sensed something. Paradoxically, the compilation of negatives was working in his favor, just as too many positives sometimes worked the other way.
“Of course, I know this is not protocol.” He said this as a way to move toward closing the deal. But that word was never used in Los Angeles.
“How many acts are you talking about, exactly?”
“Ten.”
Ten acts at an advance of $20,000 each meant $200,000.
“I can’t believe I’m considering this. Not two days ago you basically called me an idiot. No one needs a talent agent that much. You’re completely out of bounds. It’s unheard-of. But I know you have issues. I’m trying to help.”
So you see there’s no wonder why he did it. Arlene was confirming it. He thought she was confirming his real, unspoken intention. Maybe it was “for all intents and purposes” the same as the spoken one. As usual, he employed his own interpretive method. No one could possibly know the meanings that he took from one’s speech. He asked one question and meant another. Then he listened to the answer to check whether or not it represented an affirmation of the corresponding, unspoken question. He’d established the two as equivalent. When Arlene responded affirmatively to his actual question, she answered the silent and parallel one as well.
He hated Arlene more than ever now. She actually believed that he regarded the business with the same reverence that she did. She didn’t give him credit for any ambiguity. Until now, he had some minor hesitations of conscience. But no more.
He did it. After securing the deposit from Arlene, he went into the bank. Her company, the talent, the major networks, none of this crossed his mind as he entered the bank … just the teller who was extremely good- and honest-looking.
She gave him a chance to reconsider.
“Are you sure?" she asked him after he slid the withdrawal slip to her, his hand extending beneath the bars. She hesitated. He affected an air of indignation. She then counted out the bills deliberately, each bill representing another chance to change his mind. But there’s no difference between one of them and all of them, he thought, as the bills became more.
There was another delay. The teller had pressed a button. She summoned a guard. The teller found no immediate reason to explain the delay, if only because by his actions he must have forfeited certain benefits. Which ones were they? he wondered. The counting had been in graduated denominations and so the sentence would be.
Finally, “Mr. Heywood,” the teller spoke, “with sums of the size, of which you have just withdrawn, it is our procedure,” she continued, looking up behind him, at the approaching guard, “to have you escorted from the bank … by one of our security personnel.”
The explanation was rational. But he feared he might be arrested right then and there.
“But I still haven’t done anything illegal,” he thought, relieved as he walked freely through the lot to the car. The abiding possibility of reverting to “procedure” without serious consequences allowed him to keep from reverting. When, exactly, if ever, would the line be crossed, with no turning back? It was as if the thought exonerated him. He was also exonerated by words such as “procedure” and “installments.” The words made him a decent citizen and communicated the same to a quelled and believing community. They suppressed his paranoia, which would otherwise radiate and congeal as suspicion.
There was no point at which his actions could be judged and at which he could be convicted, erase the thought, no, even accused, of anything. How could any fraud be assigned? He judged these words, held them up, assigned them values: convicted equals zero, fraud equals minus one, and accused equals minus two. He considered the full force of these assignments, and, as if by his own affixing, determined their weight upon him. Once handled as concepts, they would be defeated as realities. In other words, all the control resided in his head.
When he got back to the office, a message was waiting from Arlene. He poured some coffee, then dialed her. He felt indignant and thought that Arlene should be grateful that he hadn’t stolen any money from her.
“I need an agreement from you that you’ll use those sums for the intents and purposes for which they were deemed.”
What was that? How did that phraseology get communicated to her? He didn’t like the sound of it. It had to have been carried through the air like pollen. Arlene, allergic to something, felt her nose itch. He felt badgered.
“Listen, Arlene, just because you handed me a little pile of cash doesn’t mean you own me. How dare you call here harassing me? This is no big deal. This is simply an arrangement, do you understand? Things have merely been moved around in space. Things have been transferred. There’s been no earth-shaking event here. What’s this doggerel you’re talking here?”
Arlene was momentarily silenced.
“No big deal?”
That covered only part of what outraged her. The shocking attitude he had adopted, that he insulted her again, but mostly, that there was no value anywhere. How could anyone conduct business with a whacko who valued nothing?
“Send me over paperwork to cover this,” she demanded, as if her words would execute the deed.
That night he went to face the children. Maggie, his daughter, greeted him at the door, jumping up and down, sliding along his lap. She was three. Each tenderness was a pain, seeing her innocence and trust, and knowing that he, her Daddy, was now a crook, a dark character. He slinked around the house, shadowy and stealthy. He imagined that his skin complexion was somehow darker. Maybe his own prejudice about criminals was leaking into his self-image. But what if it isn’t prejudice at all, but something universal, an image of the offender relegated to the shadows in the villages of our distant past, and buried deep within the collective unconscious? And now I’ve had tapped it! Everything up to this point had suggested itself as completely arbitrary. But here was something that presented itself as fundamental and universal.
His wife Carol stomped around the house in a desperate rage. Toys were scattered everywhere. The scent of Chinese vegetables mingled and hung in the air. Everything seemed in its place, as incongruous as it was to him. Marriage and children had generally masked his illness. But when obligations weren’t stacked up to define him, his discomfiture would sometimes disclose itself before his wife’s and even his oldest son’s, Jaime’s, eyes. These moments only seemed to augment Jaime’s feelings for his father. Richard believed that Jaime’s compassion was unlimited. But he knew that Carol didn’t have such sympathy.
During dinner, he wanted to say something about the crime he’d committed, but he couldn’t. Sensing that words were inadequate to his torment, he started moaning. The children looked at him, amazed. After hesitating, Maggie smiled. Jaime snorted and spewed milk through his nose. The baby, Daniel, imitated the grunts to the delight of the other two. Finally all three groaned and laughed. Then Richard started laughing uncontrollably. He thought then that maybe he was normal in the biological sense, because the overall accord between him and the kids was perfect. All of our tissue and its spiritual emanation are in complete accord, he thought. Everyone is a piece of biological fate unfolding. No wonder Carol doesn’t get it and the kids do.
In fact, Carol was terrified.
He wanted to watch television to escape. But he made the mistake of turning on the local news. The first story was a man being escorted to jail, hands cuffed behind, trying to head-butt the camera. The fear went through Richard’s body. Back to the anchor, another crime, and a government official indicted on thirteen charges of embezzlement, fraud, extortion and conspiracy.
So, during the day, the rules of order are established and monitored, Richard thought. At night, the focus turns to those who deviate. He felt hounded already, and yelled out to Carol who was still in the kitchen.
“The entire news is about hunting criminals!”
“You’ve just noticed?” she answered, exasperated.
And why hadn’t he noticed before? he wondered.
The pretty anchor lady hated criminals, her facial expressions and intonation showed that. He looked at Maggie crouching over her plastic kitchenware and talking to her baby doll. She stroked the baby’s hair and comforted her, while the prosecution vindicated itself against the reprobate. An airplane soared over the house and the sound indicted him. He now felt that the power resided with that big ugly whole – the airplanes, machine guns, tanks, prisons, police radios, televisions, cell phones, modems, and servers: everything was communicating instantly and circumspectfully, covering everything – human society reaching so far that he couldn’t imagine going out to the farthest reaches and looking at the wildest, rarest flower in peace. If a policeman were to stop him in the wilderness and ask him his name, he would tell the cop that he’s as anonymous as any blade of grass and the cop would scowl and search him, suspicious from the first, because all humans are guilty. Dostoevsky said that man was the “ungrateful biped” and that his ungratefulness differentiated him from all other creatures. But it’s his guilt, Richard thought. Guilt covers a multitude of sins, and guilt precedes the sin, as it did in his case, because the guilt he felt at being at odds with the environment, actually feeling guilty for finding it ludicrous, made his crime possible. He’d already believed he was in the wrong and he simply had to validate it. He was the bastard and no one should need to answer to him. Who was he to so insist that anyone live up to his so-called higher expectations? He was the anomaly and anything foreign to the system was, in biology, the sickness. And so he’d felt guilty. He felt guilty for having imaginarily crushed people mentally, denigrating them, bringing them to their proverbial knees, and, because he was a beneficent god, pulling them back up to their feet, dusting them off, and returning them, in all his mercy, their dignity as human beings – but not before they had acknowledged their inferiority and stupidity and short-comings, knowing that their minds revolved in such short range, knowing full well their planetary insignificance and the blight that they had done to him on account of their ignorance. It was this guilt that now allowed him to so easily adapt to being the criminal. These thoughts flowed freely out of him, as if having been there all the while, as if he had been expected by them, as if this moment were always waiting.
For some hours, he sat on the easy chair gazing absently at the television. The floodgates opened and everything rushed in. He was at the full disposal of the environment. He slept like that, his mind an open wound through which anything and almost everything might flow. His body was feverish the whole time while the monsters had their way with the vesicle. There were no dreams to report, there was no organizing element, simply a flourishing of chaos and the outer space having its way in an otherwise selective inner space. A deafening silence had a definite pitch, and characterless being had a definite character. Simply put, the universe revealed an intentionality, an ethereal force which communicated, not through words, but more intimately, as if from within the essence to which it wished to communicate.
He woke the next morning in a very mechanical state of mind. Everything was boiled away except for facts, which had to be dealt with. What was he going to do? The thought of killing Arlene crossed his mind, and now he knew how people got to the point of murder. He thought of just brushing her away like a gnat. Having faced the absolute, with its absolute intention, everything else seemed rather mechanical, relative, insubstantial, papier-mâché, and absorbed back into the ultimate in quick and easy order. But he knew not everyone would see it that way. His act would appear as an absolute offense to the absolute. A big deal.
Then he thought of doing nothing but allowing time to pass, letting the thing “cool off” as he eventually put it to Carol. He did let days pass. Weeks. He didn’t dare do any work. He went into his office and just touched things, afraid of the defiled papers, shuffling stacks, then left. Everything was spoiled. Only now when he’d ruined everything did he recognize any inherent value in anything. He looked at old contracts – the “talent” that he’d despised now didn’t seem so stupid. It now superseded its mere timeliness. The names looked at him as if they were immortal classics, the vengeance of the immediate against his over-blown sense of history, which had always been a defense against annihilation. The more he had resented kowtowing to the stars, the more he plunged into “great art and literature,” neglecting everything else. But it had never really worked. I never really could exist in the world, he thought, as if he’d somehow left it, as if he’d gotten his wish to be removed.
Carol’s mother, Bridget, came in from the East Coast. She was a woman of very modest, yet independent means, who never really had to work a day in her life. She had arrived in the midst of all this, expecting a site-seeing vacation on the Hollywood lots. Her timing was always pitiful. But her problem wasn’t solely a matter of timing. She always expected to be the center of attention. Likewise, her presence was inevitably regarded as importunity. He couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge her. He moved around her in the house, his eyes focused on nothing, glazed over. After a few days, she said that she just couldn’t stand the tension. He had no idea what she was talking about.
Carol had been desperate about his condition. The lack of sense was exhausting and demoralizing. Although things were growing clearer for him, he couldn’t tell her about that. She thus saw no difference between his current and previous state.
Bridget began sulking, and eventually would have no more of it. “I’ll just leave!” she announced. He was hit with a sidelong sadness and pity. There’s no world for her either, he thought, nor Carol, nor the kids. Our little grouping of pathetic creatures, the children wonderful and vibrant yet prohibited from life somehow, by me, by the world. John, Carol’s father, a drunkard; I am an alien; Bridgett, shattered by divorce; and Carol, lost in the middle of it all.
Bridget dropped a hint about taking a trip to San Francisco and Carol joined in. They would all go but him. He was relieved.
Arlene hadn’t called him for two and a half months. He was almost convinced that this meant she knew what he’d done and somehow approved of it, was looking the other way, understood his mental condition, and that, in effect, she was suggesting that he should have taken the money. He even went so far as to imagine that Arlene had designed the whole caper. Anything rather than bear the idea that Arlene was like a plotting little rat in her corner, conspiring with lawyers, a materialistic grubber, concocting the worst of calumnies and vengeance against him. Hadn’t she imagined how he was with his daughter, a distillation of the most rarefied air of beauty, or was she, like a collection agent, appraising him in terms of his debt alone, casting him in the basest form possible, extracting only one point of reference from the whole of his existence?
At that point some kind of writ must have been drawn up, containing something he’d thought it almost impossible to contain, taken as he was by the idea that he had inviolate rights of some sort, even though he was a criminal. But when necessary, he realized, the forces could draw up anything that suited them, devising laws as they went along, making statements and getting orders to say what they wanted. There is no doubt that in an effort to gain, save, or recapture some money that a conspiracy of actors will take shape and develop around a locus of justification, endowing that justification with the fullest extent of force available, will see to it life is never given value above property.
“Your house has been repossessed.” He was minutes away from home on the way back from the office. The words were audible in his head. He drove on, relieved for some reason, singing along with the song on the radio, “These Are The Good Old Days.” He noticed several bums lining the sidewalks.
Once on his street he saw from the car items that somehow looked familiar, like things closely associated with his life, on the lawn. Oh, it’s our furniture and stuff, he thought, casually at first. Then he imagined that Carol was following through on one of her threats.
Approaching the door with an aim to cop a desperate plea with her, he found a lock box on the door handle. The house was empty. The windows were naked. The hardwood floors looked at him, disclaiming, even scorning him. Jaime and Maggie’s and Daniel’s toys had been carelessly thrown on the porch.
“Arrest me but leave my children alone!” he screamed inside.
The living room where he’d wrestled with Jamie, hugged and kissed him and his sister, and Daniel, fought with yet loved his wife, was now abruptly vacated, violated and simply ransacked. A church came to his mind, the sacrilege done to statues, and the general opprobrium with which such acts are regarded. Yet here was one of the only remaining sanctuaries on earth, where he’d known the holiest of moments, if anything could be called holy, and all force was not only accepted but morally sanctioned in its desecration, granted that someone’s money, money backed by a serious institution, was at stake. At the same time knew he was being sentimental, and laughed at himself, at that bit of sermonizing, how quickly he too could adopt the moral hypocrisy.
The house had been seized by court order. Carol and the children were due back tomorrow. She’d been gone now for months.
He went immediately to his office for the money. There was $197,000 left in the safe. He’d spent $3,000 in the course of paying some office bills. He took the money and drove to the nearest police station. He had to drive around in many circles to find it … and to the first policeman behind the glass, he confessed, pushing the money toward the cop. He continued by telling him how he had been distressed to the point of insanity, but that he should not be let off, just let his wife and kids have the house back, that he should not like to plead insanity, but just take the sentence “straight up.” That’s the phrase he used, “straight up,” as if the cop were a bartender. The bartender image entered his mind, and he thought, he’ll serve you all right.
A rush of panic came over him as he realized that he’d spoken as if he could actually order whatever justice he wanted. What a mistaken idea. What if I’ve confessed under this false assumption? he thought. The panic swelled. The whole scene felt scripted, like lines that had been rehearsed by the unconscious. He felt like “the universal criminal.” This was the archetypal confession scene. But it also felt like “the universal confusion of the cop with the bartender scene.”
The cop looked at him in astonishment, told him to wait, went back into the offices, and left him standing there. He couldn’t believe that he was left alone with no guards. What if he should run, or worse, injure, or kill someone? He’d always had thoughts like that. Walking into a lobby of a hotel or office building, he would think, why are they letting me walk through here of my own accord – what if I had a gun?
Richard heard the cop laughing along with another officer behind the half-open door. He heard fragments like, “well what’ll I do with ‘em,” and “a real crack pot.” There was a long delay. He imagined that he should feel insulted at being made to wait.
It was dreadfully quiet.
He waited over an hour. Meanwhile other offenders were brought in and hurried along to the side hallways. Decent people on the other side of the law came in and filed complaints and pressed charges. One lady smiled at him as she waited after filing a complaint. No one took him to be a criminal, which made him feel worse. What if I was actually a decent, basically good person who mistook himself for the other kind and balefully committed himself to that? he thought …
“God, what an awful lot,” he whispered, thinking of himself, while at the same time a very disturbed, frothing man in torn clothes with a bleeding nose was pushed through the lobby with hands cuffed behind his back. This man’s crime was having thrashed out for being cast in such a figure – impecunious and with such an ugly face, scarred and pockmarked and disfigured. And now he was being doubly punished. Life with its one-two punches, Richard thought, and noticed the lady smiling at him again.
He had an awful insight then into his error that came by way of that thought, life with its one-two punches. The thing is to turn the other cheek, he thought, whatever the pain. This is how to escape fate’s double bind, to escape the eternal return of circumstance … But that’s not true, he countered: the finite will keep repeating itself simply because it’s finite. What else can happen? He thought about scenes that kept recurring, with slightly different layers, but through these layers one could find the same elements as in other scenes. He would suddenly notice the landscaping around a house, for example, and swear that he’d seen it before, in similar circumstances, yet something was different. He was older, and life was more complicated. Then he would yearn for simpler times, wistfully trying to grasp back through the additional layers, only to become exasperated. The new, amending and immediate circumstances were inexorable. This made it harder and harder to move freely, to act deliberately. Perhaps this inertia caused him eventually to effect more drastic ends. He had acted as if the end of this desperate act was not foreseeable – blindly, as if some mysterious objective could be achieved, throwing fate to the wind. But the return was there, somehow to his surprise.
The first policeman never came back. Another one came out. He figured this one must have been a specialist in his kind of crime. He wore plain clothes and was holding a computer print out. He kept looking down at the sheet, somewhat dolefully. The sheet had very little printing on it, a fact that upset Richard even further. Look how clean your record was, he thought. What a shame you’ve ruined it. The detective introduced himself as “Sergeant Yoke.” Averting his eyes, he asked Richard to follow him into “the examining room.” The words “examining room” had somewhat of a soothing effect, as if his were a medical or psychological, rather than criminal case, as if the prospect of being diagnosed and treated was worth all the trouble he’d gotten himself into. Then the image of the doctor increased his panic. Don’t tell me I did all this just to get professional attention, he thought.
“Sir,” Sergeant Yoke started, coming out of his shell. “If you came here to confess a crime, you’ll have to restate your confession now, but I’ve got to tell you that I’ll have to tape record it. The problem, though, he continued, now somewhat amusedly, is a kind of technicality…”
The detective stopped short, apparently thinking through the problem of this technicality. The technicality included his little speech as well. The detective gestured like an affected professor meeting with a student, carefully considering all of the subtleties of the subject, and overly enjoying the machinations of his mind. He was also asking the student’s indulgence for the considerations at hand, and asking him to join in in the enjoyment of nuances. The student felt tempted to entertain himself with the professor, when he remembered his reading. But he recalled that the detective wasn’t trying to gain his confidence in order to trick out a confession. He’d come to confess in the first place. The detective was frankly asking his indulgence and admitting to a problem in the law. He wanted Richard’s sympathy.
“The thing is,” he resumed, “is that I can’t arrest you without a confession, and yet I can’t read you your Miranda rights until I’m about to arrest you. But I can’t let you confess without first offering you the benefit of having a lawyer, which is really a part of the Miranda. So really I should arrest you first, if for nothing else than reading you the Miranda. Then again you really haven’t legally confessed yet, so why should I arrest you? So you really have a choice here. You could leave here right now. Of course we wouldn’t leave it at that. We’d send over an investigator to see if there are any grounds for an arrest, and if there were, we’d arrest you at that point. Then you could fulfill this confession need, and the case against you would be more substantial. The other choice…”
If Sergeant Yoke had at first tried to prune his speech, he finally gave up and simply spat it out whole. He’d spoken as if Richard simply shared with him an interest in an impartial execution of the law. The phrase “this confession need” modified that a bit. But the fact that Richard would be the object of that impartial execution seemed barely to have crossed the detective’s mind.
“Well, there really is no other choice,” he concluded.
Richard wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to know what was going on.
“And what about my house?” he demanded. “How could they have just seized my house like this? Is this the civil side of the same thing, or did you people do this?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the sergeant said, growing annoyed.
“I mean, is that legal, just taking my house like that?”
“That depends on why it is being taken.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know why?” Richard asked, growing even more alarmed.
“You’re saying that your house was taken and in connection with this?” the sergeant asked, definitely irritated. His life had just been complicated further. Richard could see him thinking about how convoluted it would be to track all of this.
“It sounds like you need a lawyer,” the sergeant broke, relieved by his sudden recognition and cracking a smile, which wasn’t really malicious.
That does me no good, Richard thought.
“That doesn’t help me,” he snapped, as if the sergeant were there to ease his mind, to help him. The detective actually assumed this role for a few minutes, telling him to ask someone he trusted to help him find a lawyer, that he should tell the lawyer everything, without exception, and so on.
Richard thought then that the detective and this proposed legal advocate were in cahoots, the whole legal system was one big conspiracy, the defense and the prosecution just feeding each other business.
“Well, I guess that’s all then,” Richard said, standing up to go, the situation taking on aspects unlike itself, as if he’d been with a psychologist, or a car salesman, or a priest. The ball of authority was unraveling in his mind, and he was letting it unravel before them all. It was as if the guilt had been magnetized long ago and now sought its polarity. Bad thoughts, bad conscience, bad credit, all seeking to be reproached by their origins.
He walked out of the station. It was a beautiful evening, a billowing sky painting of huge bluffs. Beauty was so vivid in times of crisis. Nature mocked his distress.
Thank God for hotels, he thought. He booked a room in the Ramada in the little town center. Whether or not his bank account was frozen, the Visa was still good. The girl slid it through the magnetic slit perfunctorily and he slipped through a crack in the computer network. A hotel forgives; hotels forgive anyone, at least for a night. He was happy about staying in one. Such were the tricks played by the residual memory banks shooting little associative doses of pleasure at him, inappropriately.
He had almost forgotten the events of the day in the common whirlpool. He was suddenly thrust into the immediate present and no future existed. Tonight he had a hotel room, which was as far as it went. But the rising heat of the whirlpool flushed blood to his head and the panic swelled again. He’d given over the $197,000 to the police and it hadn’t been returned. What about Carol and the kids? They had no home to come home to. Forget about me, but the kids, their toys, the furniture, everything, was all out on the street. What am I going todo about all this? And how could I have imagined that I could live for any real length of time on $200,000? I can’t even live for a year on $400,000.
These thoughts did not frighten him as much as the idea that they hadn’t occurred to him before. How ill forged the plan was, he thought. It was no plan at all, none that he knew of.
The next day he awoke to the thought of calling Arlene. Something was resolved during the night’s sleep. He went to the office. When he arrived a message was waiting on his voice mail. Arlene’s voice was quiet and kind. She had nothing to do with the seizure of the house. That was obvious. He finally realized that he’d left the mortgage unpaid for three months while Carol was away. And now he’d confessed to a crime, which hadn’t officially been committed before he’d admitted to it.
All of this brought Richard to his first “status conference,” after Carol and the kids had moved back to her mother’s, and Richard moved into a boarding room.
Why did he destroy his life? He sometimes reasoned that his floating guilt needed a home, a meaningful and fitting anchor for its existence. You may not believe it, and rightfully so, he thought, imagining an audience of cynics. You may deny that any feelings need justification, convinced that no fantasies deserve action. In that case, you can walk around the way you are and keep denying them. But as for me, I’ve acted and forged a destiny. I’ve met with my fate and committed an act connected to my imaginings.
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Nice try Rec - definitely written by AI.
🤣 Haha! Just kidding. 😉