A.W.I.A. 21: Back

As I was saying, , or something, I don't know. I got derailed. (Take those tracks, Junie H.) But it's been long enough now that I can go on. I know some minutes are missing; some of those thoughts in the bathroom are unaccounted for, and what made me decide to leave, but I can't be worried about that now.

The main thing that you need to know was that when I left there, I headed back to the room where the man who claimed to be a doctor waited for me, and I stopped just short of the door. Behind me the hall deadended after the bathroom at a window wall. But ahead, past more doors, the hall ahead bent in an inviting way: the left wall continued about ten feet after the right wall discontinued, until it struck another wall, a perpendicular one. At the scene of this collision two chairs at right angles had cornered a ficus and guarded it like puffy orange vinyl dogcatchers with chrome legs. There was a busy kind of quiet about the place: the implied hum of the overhead fluorescents, and muffled voices just out of earshot.

I did a little thought experiment. If I was not a prisoner, I reasoned, I did not have to reenter the room with the man who claimed to be a doctor.

I'm hungry and we won't have lunch for at least an hour.

By the way, what Sergeant Tanner had for me was not one bit good. Or maybe it was, and I just don't understand. It was a note.

It said,

Loretta, I know you don't want to tell, but it's the only way out of here. You have to tell them your whole story. This is mine:

The first sign was that he was a man. The next was that he did not stop his car at the check point. The third sign came when Drew called out, and he still did not stop. We watched for things that would be fine at home but, there, took on an edge. In the tank, yards off, I might have been safe, but the folks in the square would not have. We were there for them, so they could live their lives. It was my job to stop him.

He might have been deaf, like the one Bates stopped, or just not have had his mind on things, or not.

I called out the code. I fired. The glass broke and the car hit the wall.

I held my breath. There was no bang or boom. But there could have been, they said when they'd gone through the car, if he'd done it right. And when they told me they'd found his hands taped to the wheel, his foot taped to the gas, I knew what it felt like to be him.

Lance Cooper Tanner

You can't tell from this, but his handwriting is very old-fashioned.

Well, it must have been the costume.

Tonight after dinner, we were eating our ice cream when Sergeant Tanner told us he is leaving in the morning. He says he wants me to follow him back to his area after breakfast, and that he has something for me. I'm sad he's leaving but I hope it's good. The ice cream, in case you were wondering, was Neapolitan. I don't know how that fits Dr. Arkwright's theory.

As promised...

Here's Sergeant Tanner, as Possibility.

the man who claims to be a doctor claims that i broke faith with you.

Never mind that one of you clearly betrayed me to Junie H; he says that you were my friends, and it was wrong. But why did you do it? Best not to tell me, unless you really need me to know.

What masks people had on yesterday: Sergeant Tanner dressed as Possibility; if I can find a picture I will post it here. And I went as an egg: for my communicative break-fast. Dr. Arkwright once pointed out to me that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in the daily cycle of human meals, too, when you think about it. We eat the embryo for breakfast, and the mature chicken for dinner.