Far Afield

V

28 V I wish I knew what causes me to become so helpless in situations like these. Yes, I could have resisted and put up a fight but a sense of sheer futility always overcomes me just when I most need the lash of purposeful outrage. In a moment, I seem to fully understand all the long-term implications of my situation and thus am perfectly willing to quit my short-term struggling because of it. Besides, on the occasions when my irregular anger does arise, it never does me any good; usually it erupts over some generalized, world-engulfed condition in which I am incapable of action, anyway (say, religious intolerance or ethnic warfare), rather than any situation at hand. As a result, I’ve found it better to try and avoid outrage altogether. Or perhaps it’s just a greater realization that dawns on me. Caught in the grip of unforeseen events, I often recall my journalistic experiences and the thousands of situations I have been privy to and tried to record. From them, I’ve learned that it occasionally falls on all of us to be prodded forth when we least deserve it and to be made public for others’ comment and analyses. Perhaps from this we learn more of what it is like to be ourselves and how then to suffer our individual destinies. This awareness, of course, comes afterward. In the immediate flush of such experiences, nothing at all gives comfort or makes sense and one’s primary intention is only to learn the new codes of conduct: I have to walk ahead now but only one step, not two. I can ask to use the bathroom but I likely won’t go alone. I can ask Scott Brown 29 for a cigarette if the other person smokes, etc. As it was now with me. With my hands manacled in full frontal view, I was escorted through the lobby that now was congested with gawking German tourists, helped into a police Jeep parked curbside, and taken on a brief but windswept ride into the dilapidated town center. I thus emerged on the other end with my handcuffs and exploded hair looking something on the order of a distempered prophet, or at the very least, an obvious sociopath. Officer Entrade helped me from the Jeep and into the grimy station, which, like his uniform, was colored a bright tropical blue. Inside, there was only one other officer and a middle-aged woman with a red face who sat behind a row of potted plants at a desk marked “Civilian Volunteer.” They interrupted their conversation to smile and nod at me as I was led through the room and down another hallway—this one a narrow passage with high ceilings— finally to my cell where another officer with a too-large cap and a smear of purple chalk dust on his shirt waited for us. “Here we are,” said Entrade. “And they’ve brought you your jacket.” With a slight push from behind, I was entered into the cell and the grated door swung shut. Before me was a plywood cot on which lay a torn jacket spraying filthy gray down. The room was cold and infected with a sour fungal smell and faint sunlight struggled to penetrate a cloudy plexiglass window. A busy halo of green flies circled overhead. Faced with this, I then did what every actor in every standard prison drama does—I turned around, grasped the bars and looked out. In front of me was the opposite wall of the dingy corridor. But then a voice spoke up quickly behind me. “Ah, thank you, George Baker, for the company.” I turned and saw with intense dismay the large, fleshy man whom I’d spoken to (or rather, who had spoken to me) on the beach. He still had on his tan suit and as before, he thrust out his right hand as if I was about to run away from him. As he strode across the cell, I also saw he had a pronounced limp on his left side. 30 Far Afield “We meet again, as I thought we might,” he said as he assaulted me anew. “It’s Trevor MacGower, recall?” I again took his moist hand and this time felt the presence of at least two rings on his fat fingers. After a moment, I tried to release myself...