A.W.I.A, Part 8: Tired

He was a man of average height, neither stocky nor scrawny. He wore no jewelry, that I could see. He was middle-aged.

"I've answered a lot of your questions," I told him.

He raised his eyebrows.

"I've been here a long time and I've answered a lot of your questions," I said again.

"Which ones in particular do you feel you've answered?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"I don't think you've answered as many questions as you think you have," he told me, now folding his arms across the pad.

"Nevertheless," I said, "It's time for me to ask something of you."

"I'm not making any promises, but what is it?"

"I'd like a cup of coffee," I told him.

"That I can do," he said, rising.

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A.W.I.A, Part 7

The man who was supposed to be a doctor did not look satisfied with my answer. In a game in which he appeared to hold every single card, this was the closest I might expect to come to winning a trick. As such, I had every right to regard it as a victory, and was not sure why it didn't feel that way.

I felt the room, already small, getting smaller. I became aware of the way a beam of late afternoon sun streamed through the single high corner window and was cut off a few inches further along by the gray wall. This was what they wanted to do to me: cramp, deny, prune, truncate. Already, I had been meeting with the man who was supposed to be a doctor for over an hour, and no accommodations had been made for my comfort.

I looked at him. Already, I have told you, he was not bad-looking. He slouched a little in his chair. His sleeves were rolled up and and his bare forearms were on the the table on either side of the lined pad where his pen rested, the hands open and palm-down on the table. The arrangement of his forearms--further apart at the wrist than at the elbow--seemed sympathetic to me, if not my cause.

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another interruption, about supper.

This is the view from the window in the room where we eat breakfast, lunch and supper.

Supper tonight was strange: A dish billed as Hamburger Abendblatt, and roasted vegetables. We were all tired, and ate in an unaccustomed and uncomfortable silence.

I don't care for the silence. You look out into the wide open space beyond the window while you think tighter and tighter thoughts in smaller and smaller circles and, finally, they all narrow to a point: something is wrong.

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A.W.I.A, Part 6: He Tells Me Stories

So far, in our interview, the man who was supposed to be a doctor had caught me in an elegant trap, but he was perhaps too polite, or too canny, to acknowledge this victory.

He did not even acknowledge that I was blushing. Instead, he said, "I am going to tell you three stories I heard today, and then I'll ask you which one sounds most plausible."

I watched him.

"All right?" he asked. "You understand?"

"Perhaps," I told him.

"Good enough," he said. "I'll number the stories, for easy reference."

I nodded.

Then he held up a hand--fingers folded to the palm, thumb out--so suddenly that I flinched. If he's adding hand signals, I thought, I don't know what I'll do. But he was indicating the beginning of the first story.

"One. A woman was sitting quietly in her home. Authorities came and removed her for no reason at all."

I nodded.

With a crisp little flick he extended his index finger from his palm. With his thumb, it made an L. I wondered if that meant something; if he was spelling, as well as counting. "Two. A woman threw a chair through a second-floor window, hitting her neighbor's car. Authorities came and removed her." This, then was the second story.

Another crisp flick and his middle finger was up, his fingers forming a trident, a tilted K, the Hebrew letter shin. "Three: A woman was removed from her home following the receipt by a certain party of a number of threatening letters. She told the people who came to remove her that she had mailed the letters in self-defense, as a response to certain coded, televised messages."

I nodded again. These were the three stories, and now I understood. They were all equally plausible, and of course, that was what made it such a clever question. But I could only say for certain that one of them was true, because it was mine. To the man who was supposed to be a doctor I said,
"The first is the one that I know to be true."

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Movement of a certain kind

A whole new set of things has been happening in my interviews with the man who is supposed to be a doctor, but I am not ready to discuss those yet. Suffice it to say certain challenges have been posed, and they'll be dispatched, and I'll discuss all of it in time.

For now, I'll tell you that I sat with Corporal Tanner at breakfast again, and said, "How do you do this morning, Corporal Tanner?"

He told me he was well. He was not, however, a corporal, but a sergeant. Furthermore, he said, I could call him by his first name, Lance. His full name is Lance Cooper Tanner, and when he got here, someone misread his file and thought he was a Lance Corporal.

I felt a new spark in Sergeant Tannner today. He's done more than correct what we call him; he's moving differently. Before his movements were marked by an economy, maybe even a parsimony. When he was not in transit or eating, he sat tense and unmoving.

But now his stillness has a calmer quality, and today he even performed what could only be described as a gratuitous gesture (a sort of one-armed shrug, while the other arm remained at his side) when he was telling the story about the mix-up with his rank.

I've become more aware of motion here. There's so little furniture, so little scenery, that people are almost all I have to look at. Garland and Arkwright both hesitate before moving, looking around, for permission, maybe, and when they do stand and walk it seems like each step pains them, like the little mermaid in the fairy tale. Meanwhile Jenna moves swiftly and heedlessly, like an animal with no known predators. I don't clearly remember noticing how the anthropologist and the ethaesthetics professor moved, and both have now left our group. Minnie, who's new, is still shy, and I'm not sure I can describe her yet.

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We will get back to the interview, but today I had lunch with...

...A young man named Garland. He's in his early thirties, and has worked for several years as an aphorist. He has steady work for clothing and laminated wallet cards, but he's made most of his money in licensing deals. For instance, his "The apprentice is as only as good as his master," was the inspiration for the violent graduate student group "The Ex-Apprentices" in the book Roderick's Only Bear (and the film adaptation of the same name).

He told me that he feels his aphorisms have become better and better, but the market for the high-end work is really limited. The last thing he sent his agent before coming here, months ago, was a pitch for a bumper sticker that read, "If you could just tell people what they need to know, we'd all be a bumper sticker away from salvation." It still hasn't been sold.

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A.W.I.A, Part 5: The Tables Turned, and Turned Again

Now that the man who was supposed to be a doctor was ready to communicate with me, I was not sure I was ready to hear what he had to say. I may have even insulted him, when he told me that he listened to stories for a living, by telling him that it didn't sound to me like a grown-up occupation.

He looked surprised, certainly. "What do you mean by that?"

"What do I mean by that? Exactly what I said. What could I mean by that?"

"That's exactly what I would like to know."

He seemed like a bright enough man. Cagy, certainly. But was he? Out loud, I wondered,
"What is the virtue of an intelligence that renders clear things cryptic?"

He let my question hang there before answering, but I was already blushing to my ears when he said,"I might ask the same of you."

I had fallen right into his trap. Or was it a trap? Had he set it deliberately or inadvertently? Either way, I'd failed myself by blushing.

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A.W.I.A, Part 4: More Interview

If you know what happened so far, you know that when the man who was supposed to be a doctor told me, "I said, people who tell stories with missing parts, in my experiences, usually constitute the missing parts themselves," you know he was lying.

This was not exactly what he'd said. I know because I have a very good memory. What he'd said was similar--uncannily similar--but nonetheless different.

I was ready for this kind of discrepancy in ordinary people, but this man was supposed to be a doctor. I didn't imagine a man of learning, a man of science, would permit this degree of inexactitude. It occurred to me that I ought to ask for a paper and a pen to document this conversation--he had a pad and pen, after all, even if he didn't seem to use it much.

But I decided not to ask him just then. It wasn't any kind of giving in or submission. Although, yes, I was not asking for something that I did want, so it might have looked like that. But actually, this was a way to preserve my power. As soon as he was aware of my desire to document the interview, he'd know I was on to him, and he would become more cautious about what he gave away. I had to keep him open and trusting me, so I could continue to study him.

I studied him now. He was not bad-looking, I decided. He had a clean-shaven face, bright eyes and reasonable eyebrows. He did seem tired. His shoulders sloped.

When we had been quiet for a long time, he laid his hands flat on the table.

"Look," he said. "I listen to stories for a living."

He was being honest with me, so I felt I could be honest with him.
I told him, "That does not sound like a grown-up occupation."

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