“That’s me,” I said, trying to get my head straight.
“Come on.”
He turned and left the cell. I followed. Three other men were waiting for me outside. One wore a blue uniform; the other three were clad in gray. They surrounded me in diamond formation, their protection unbreakable. They didn’t even bind my hands.
We went down an extraordinarily long hall of green cell doors and lighter green walls, turned a corner, and walked down a hall the same length again. Then we came to a huge elevator. The man who retrieved me from the cell pressed one of the middle buttons. The elevator moved so slowly I didn’t know if we were going up or down.
We came out into a large square room that was lined by doors on all sides. They brought me to an office in the far-right corner. One of my guards opened the door and I entered, wondering if I could have subdued those men and made my escape if I were some great martial arts master.
Sitting behind a very messy desk was a huge-faced white man with a pink wart on his nose. His nameplate said BILL TORNAY. Tornay was reading a file, maybe mine, and scowling hideously.
“Sit,” he said without looking at me.
There was one chair but it had a few dozen manila folders on it. I wondered if I should remove the folders or just sit on them.
The monster looked up at me after a few beats of indecision. “I said, sit down.”
I sat on the folders.
“Ben Arna Dibbuk,” he said. “Is ‘Ben’ short for ‘Benjamin’?”
“No, it’s not.”
“What are you in here for, Dibbuk?”
There was an odd scent in the air. I didn’t know if it was the man or just his environment, but it was a sour odor that had a ripe edge to it. I felt my butt slipping on the slick folders.
“I have no idea,” I said, scooting backward in the chair. “Officer Bandell just picked me up and said that they were going to hold me.”
“Did he allow you a phone call?”
“No.”
“Did he read you your rights?”
“He never asked me anything and he said almost as little.”
My turn of phrase caught the ugly man’s attention.
“It says here that you’re a computer programmer,” he said. “Where do you work?”
“Our Bank.”
“Are you in trouble there?”
“Not that I know of.”
He studied my face, looking for signs of criminality or depravity. He leaned back and the office chair cried out as if in pain.
“Do you want to make a call?” he asked.
“Do you know what time it is?” I had lost track of the hour.
“Eleven fifteen.”
“Tuesday morning?”
That got the man to smile. He was even uglier when showing good humor.
He called to the men in the hall and they took me to a corridor of pay phones. One of them handed me a quarter and they let me loose among the dozen or more little cubbies that contained the phones. The corridor was actually a cul-de-sac, so they didn’t have to worry about me running away.
“Hello?”
“Hey, brother man,” I said.
“Ben,” Cassius Copeland said with real happiness in his tone. “Where are you?”
I told him about my arrest. He took down all the information I could give him and said that he’d look for a lawyer. After he hung up, I sat there for a while longer, pretending to speak to someone in low tones. I didn’t want to go back to that cell. As long as I was in there, it was okay, but now that I was out, I wanted to stay out.
Finally I knew I had to get off. I hung up and went back to the jail guards.
In my cell again I wondered about Mona. She was definitely with Harvard again. Sex with him would always be better. She was even fucking him while using me for the cock. But maybe she hadn’t actually betrayed me. Maybe she had mentioned about the therapist and he passed the information on without her knowledge.
I didn’t hate her for loving someone else; I was just lonely. My daughter most likely didn’t even know that I was missing. I felt completely alone in that cell. I think I would have cried if my silent cellmate weren’t there.
I wondered if this was how it would be in Colorado once I was convicted for the murder I may or may not have committed. Would I just be sitting on a cot staring into space, counting the days, looking forward to rice pudding on Friday nights and letters from my daughter?
She would get married, have kids, and send me photographs. I would look at those pictures, feeling distant, disconnected. But I’d write letters telling her how beautiful the children were and I’d send them little gifts that I’d make in the wood shop or metal shop that the prison afforded.
I spent the rest of my jail time having fantasies like that. I thought about my mother coming and apologizing for her negligence. I thought about my brother getting out of prison and him coming to visit me so that he could gloat over how far I’d fallen.
“You were always the one they liked more,” he’d tell me.
“They never liked either one of us,” I’d say to Briggs. “We were both failed experiments — like Frankenstein’s monster or American democracy.”
A few hours after I’d been to see him, the green metal door opened and Bill Tornay entered. The cell stank from my roommate’s use of the commode. I was embarrassed that the warden coming in would think I had made that smell.
I had closed my eyes while my cellmate took his grunting shit. We’d had two meals; powdered eggs for breakfast and bologna sandwiches on white bread for lunch.
“Mr. Dibbuk,” the hippopotamus-faced ugly man said, “come with me.”
He was alone. Standing up he was more of an oddity than he was behind the scrim of refuse piled on his desk. He had small, slender shoulders while his legs were huge, shapeless pillars of flesh. He walked as an elephant might if an elephant stood upright on two legs. It was a shambling, side-to-side motion that had very little to do with everyday humanity.
The sour-ripe smell did come from Tornay. It wafted behind him, making me want to take the lead. But I couldn’t do that. I was a prisoner; I would be for the rest of my life.
We took the long halls again, rode in the elevator again, but this time we exited into a room that had sunlight in it. We went to an office, where a white man in a sharp dark suit stood.
“Mr. Dibbuk,” the man said.
“Yes.”
“I’m Agent Lawry. I’m with the FBI.”
“What does the FBI want with me?” I asked.
Bill Tornay was already gone. The door closed behind him.
“The FBI has no interest in you, sir,” Lawry said. “I’m just here to take you somewhere.”
“Where?”
“You’ll see.”
After giving me my things back, Agent Lawry took me to the police garage. He drove a black Ford. There were no frills in the company car. It seemed like a rental; impersonal and clean.
Lawry was of medium height and in shape. He had no facial hair, pimples, or blemishes. His brown hair was cut short, but not too short. Once we were in the car, his sentences were all five words or less.
For all his studied anonymity, the FBI man had a very peculiar face. It was both flat and thin. This seemed like a contradiction. Long faces needed to come out and flat ones belonged on round heads. If I had ever seen Lawry on a street or across a room, I would have remembered his odd mug.
I asked him questions about my arrest and him coming to retrieve me. His answers were all short and meaningless.
He’d driven us for a dozen minutes, no more, when we came to a stop. I was surprised to see that we were parked in front of Joey Bondhauser’s Steak House.
“Here you go,” Lawry said.
“So we’re finished?”
His only reply was a nod.