A square metal table and two chairs stood in the center of the room.
A third chair had been placed in a corner. Maybe that was where they would make me sit if I didn’t behave.
One of the officers pulled out a chair for me, which seemed to be a hopeful sign that they were respectful of a prisoner’s innate human dignity.
But then the other guy shackled my right ankle to a ringbolt that was built in to the table leg. Although he did not handle me roughly, he did seem to be contemptuous of me.
Without informing me of what crime I was suspected of having committed, not bothering to explain the system for ordering a snack if I should want one, they went out and closed the door, leaving me alone.
Coming in, I had noticed that the door was so thick it must have been designed by a paranoid. It closed with the solid clunk of one thousand pounds of steel.
They had left me with nothing to do except contemplate my pain threshold and my mortality, which was probably their intention.
The table to which I had been shackled seemed heavy but not immovable. I felt sure that I could drag it around my windowless prison, but as the room offered nothing to see or do, I remained seated.
When I peered under the table, I noted an eight-inch-diameter drain with a slotted grille. Considering that Magic Beach had no history of floods, I supposed that this design feature facilitated the hosing-out of the room after unfortunate accidents.
This was one of those sobering circumstances in which my overheated imagination, if I were not careful, could cause a portion of my cerebellum to melt down, and set my hair on fire. I counseled myself that I remained in the United States, which was not Cuba or Venezuela, or even Mordor.
I consulted my watch—8:56. I still had a few minutes more than three hours to save the world or a significant portion thereof. No problem.
Because I had firm control of myself, I did not care when nothing happened by 8:57 or by 8:58, although I was within seconds of shouting strident demands for justice when the door finally opened at 8:59.
One man entered the room, but he was enough. At the church, I had thought of him as Brush Cut, but I had since learned that his name was Hoss Shackett and that he was the chief of police.
Hoss must have been the short form of a longer name, but I didn’t know what that might be. I had asked the younger officers in the car but they had twice refused to answer me; and the third time that I asked, they had advised me to perform an act of reproduction with myself.
After closing the blastproof door—of which Norman must have several in his Cold War missile silo in Nebraska—the chief came to the table and stood staring down at me. He didn’t say anything. He just stared.
I smiled and nodded. He didn’t.
After I had busied myself for a while staring at my hands and wondering what they would look like after being smashed with a tire iron, the chief pulled out the other chair and sat down across the table from me.
When I looked up, ready to parry his questions, he still did not speak. He continued to stare at me.
He had ugly green eyes colder than those of a snake, although I would not have made this observation to his face or, for that matter, within one hundred miles of his jurisdiction.
I am not a stickler for etiquette, but I did not feel that it was my place to initiate our conversation.
After a while, I could not bear to stare into his venomous eyes any longer. Either I had to look away from him, which he would take as a sign of weakness, or I had to say something that would force him to speak.
“I imagine,” I said with a relaxed affability that surprised me, “you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”
He neither replied nor broke eye contact.
“I have never been in trouble with the law,” I told him.
He remained fixated on me and was so still that I could not be sure that he breathed—or needed to.
If there was a Mrs. Hoss, she was either psychological wreckage or one tough mama.
“Well,” I said, and could think of nothing to add.
At last he blinked. It was a slow blink, as if he were an iguana dazed by desert sun.
He held out his right hand and said, “Take my hand.”
I knew what this was about, and I wanted no part of it.
His hand remained above the table, palm up. He had hands big enough to play professional basketball, although the most sporting thing he had probably ever done with them was bash suspects’ heads together.
Over the years, I had read thrillers in which the authors wrote things like “the air was full of violence” and “the pending violence hung over the scene like black thunderheads.” I had always judged this to be clumsy writing, but maybe they should have won Nobels and Pulitzers.
“Take my hand,” Hoss Shackett repeated.
I said, “I’m already dating someone.”
“What’s the point of dating if your pecker’s broken off?”
“It’s a platonic relationship, anyway.”
My hands were folded on the table. Viper-quick, he struck, seizing my left hand, folding it tight enoug
h in his to make me wish I’d had my knuckles surgically removed.
The grim concrete cell vanished, and I stood once more on Armageddon Beach, in a tempest of crimson light.
Chief Hoss Shackett was not a man who lightly revealed what he was feeling or thinking. But when he dropped my hand, returning me to reality, and leaned back in his chair, I could tell from a slight widening of his pupils that he had shared my nightmare vision.
“So,” I said, “what was that about?”
He did not reply.
“Because,” I said, “that has only happened to me once before, and it freaks me out.”
He had a hard strong face that Stalin would have envied. His jaw muscles were so knotted at the hinges that he appeared able to crack walnuts in his teeth.
“Nothing like this—sharing a dream—has ever happened to me before,” I assured him. “It’s every bit as awkward for me as it is for you.”
“Sharing a dream.”
“I had this dream, and now people touch me and I’m thrown back into it. What is this—the Twilight Zone?”
He leaned forward, a small move, but it was like being in a Jurassic meadow when the T. rex that has its back to you casually looks over its shoulder.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I have no idea.”
“I won’t keep asking nice like this.”
“Sir, I appreciate how nice you’ve been. I really do. But I’m serious. I have amnesia.”
“Amnesia.”
“Yes.”
“That’s pathetic.”
“It really is. Not knowing my past, my name, where I’m from, where I’m going. It’s totally pathetic.”
“You told Reverend Moran your name was Todd.”
“Sir, I swear, it was just a name to tell him. I could have said Larry or Vernon, or Rupert, or Ringo. I could be anybody. I just do not know.”
He did the staring thing again. It was as effective as it had been previously. Second by second, I became increasingly convinced that if I didn’t spill everything about myself, he would bite off my nose. For starters.