10:12 Wrapping Up

With the humidity and no clean underwear to change into, I’ve really started to stink, a sour funk rising from my t-shirt. I give the shirt a whiff and . . . “Oof!“

Talk about a punch in the nose!

I take off the t-shirt and dump it in the sink and scrub it down with one of the half bars of soap, then do the same with my body, wiping my armpits and chest with a soapy wet hand towel.

“Number Six!”

“Huh?”

“What the hell are you doing?” a guard yells through the small front window.

“I was just . . . ”

“Washing up time is before lights out!”

“Sorry.”

“Hurry up and get dressed, then,” he says unlocking the door to my cell. “Shirabe.”

I dry off and put on a relatively fresh t-shirt and the standard gray over shirt over it, making sure to tuck in the tails into the gray shorts. As I step down and out of my cell, I possess as much dignity as a homeless man caught in a sudden downpour.

*

An extra chair has been brought into the interrogation room and placed in the narrow space between the desks and the left side of the room. Kojima, the incompetent translator from Customs, is sitting in it, grinning from ear to ear.

“How are you doing?” he asks, pummeling me with that nasty breath of his.

“Lovely, just lovely. And you?”

“Fine, thank you, and you?”

Ugh.

Ozawa asks about lunch.

“Same old, same old: barley tea, barley rice, again.”

“That’s it?”

“That, and some brown gunk resembling curry.”

Nakata looks up from his notebook computer and says he loves curry.

“Ooh, not this curry, you wouldn’t,” I reply.

Nakata and Ozawa spend the next hour busily typing up their reports on their respective notebook computers. In all our meetings, I’ve never seen the two so busy. According to Adachi, everything the cops and I have discussed over the past week has to be summarized, printed up and signed by me by the eighth day of detention. The document will then be submitted to the prosecutor.

Every now and then, one of them stops typing, and asks me to clarify something.

“Naila’s you’re cousin from your mother’s side, right?”

“Yes, she’s the oldest daughter of my mother’s youngest sister.”

“Thanks.”

And after lobbing a few of these soft balls, they pitch a slider: What did you ask your cousin to send?

I repeat exactly what I have already told them many times over that I had, neither specifically nor implicitly, requested Naila to send me anything.

They return to typing up their notes.

As they busy themselves with their reports, I look at my fingernails. For all the mad filing I’ve been doing against the concrete floor near the toilet in my cell, I’ve still managed to grow a set of claws that would make any hot-blooded carnivore proud.

“It’s probably useless asking, but one of you guys wouldn’t happen to have a nail clipper on you?”

I take it as a no when they all laugh.

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注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved.

~ by Aonghas Crowe on March 29, 2010.