A little before noon, my students start to arrive, and each one, noticing the Macs are gone, asks the same question: What happened?
“I sent them away,” I tell them, “to be debugged and upgraded and . . .”
Oh, you’d think I’d just delivered a zinger the way they double over with laughter. The thing is, for years I have been singing the praises of Macs and lobbing insults at their lousy PCs, a grassroots rabble-rouser standing up to that tin-pot dictator of a company, Microsoft. Now I have to pretend to swallow my pride and admit that I, too, could be frustrated by the very same problems they have had with their own PCs.
How would they react if I told them the truth that the cops stormed into my place only hours ago and confiscated the computers? Would they stick around and try to encourage me, or would they politely excuse themselves?
Having dodged the issue of the missing Macs, I now have to try to maintain my composure over the next ninety minutes. No small task when the levee holding back all my anxieties is leaking like a sieve.
What if the cops find something in my urine? Why the fuckdid I have to say “yes” to dé Dale? I wasn’t even interested . . . I, I didn’t even want it . . . Why, oh why did I say “yes”? Why couldn’t I have said “no”? I could have, but what did I say? “Sure, dé Dale, why not?” You know why? You’re a weak fucking bastard’s why.
Every fifteen minutes the stress gets to be too much and I have to excuse myself from the lesson to go to the toilet. “Drank too much coffee this morning,” I tell my students. “Ha, ha, ha.”
And what are the cops going to find on my hard disks? Good God, my whole life is in those computers. If they can’t find enough to arrest me in my urine, they’ll surely have no trouble finding it among all the files . . .
Returning to the lesson, I mop the perspiration from my brow.
“Damn hot today, isn’t it? You hot, too? No? You’re fine? Amazing! I’m burning up here. Mind if I turn up the air-con? You do? Damn.”
Has dé Dale been busted, too? Is he being questioned by the police right now?
Runnels of sweat flowing down my back, I set an electric fan next to my feet and switch it on high.
“I want you to think carefully about what might have happened around you,” Ozawa told me before he left.
He had gestured specifically toward the dining table as if he knew what dé Dale and I had been doing there last weekend, as if he had been watching usthe whole time.
What have the cops seen? What do they know?
“Tell us anything you can remember.”
Ozawa, that’s the problem. I remember plenty, but you are the last person in the world I will ever tell.
The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.
Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.