Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

26

“I CAN’T MEET FRED STOON,” I whispered forcefully through the kiss. Our teeth clacked together painfully.

“Why?” She had a hell of a time pronouncing the ‘w.’

“Tell you later.”

She broke the clinch. Stoon had discreetly removed himself from the doorway again. Marian said, “You’ll tell me now. Come on, we’ll go to my place.”

“I can’t go through that kitchen. Once he sees me, it’s all over.”

She gave me a frank appraisal. “You’re weird, Harry,” she decided. “Come on.”

So we left the porch, walked around the outside of the house through the snow, went back in through the front door, found our coats in the welter on the bench, and left.

She had a car, a blue Volkswagen beetle. On the trip I said, “I sure hope you have something to drink at your place.”

“I do,” she said. “And you better have an awful good story to tell by the time we get there.”

I didn’t. I didn’t have any story at all. A great weariness and emptiness had overtaken me, and though God knows I tried to think up some sort of lie that would cover the circumstances, it was just impossible, and when we got to Marian’s place, a small snug three-room apartment in an elderly brick apartment building, I simply sat down and told her the truth.

The whole truth. My entire life story, from the dog crap in the pencil to the stink bombs in the bank. Everything, including my real name. “With an umlaut,” I said hopelessly.

I don’t think she ever entirely disbelieved me, though on the other hand she found it very very hard to believe me. “You’re a prisoner?” she kept saying. “A convict? At the penitentiary?”

“Yes,” I said, and went on with my story.

Well, it took a while to tell, and Marian kept both of our glasses full the whole time, and by the time I was finished I was utterly weary and in despair. “Poor baby,” she said, and cuddled my head against her bosom for consolation, and shortly after that we went to bed.

I woke up and it was still dark. But what time was it? I sat bolt upright and said, “Hey!”

“Mmf?” A sleepy form moved obscurely in the darkness next to me. “What?”

I remembered everything, I knew I had told the whole thing to this woman I didn’t even know. But I didn’t care about that now, I had a much more urgent problem. I said, “What time is it?”

“Um. Oom.” Rustling and rattling. “Twenty after five.”

“Holy Christ!” I shouted, and jumped out of bed. “I’ve got to get back to prison!”

She sat up and switched on the bedside lamp. Squinting at me, she said, “I’ve known some weird guys, Harry, but you’re the winner. I’ve had them wake up and say, ‘I’ve got to get back to my wife,’ ‘I’ve got to catch a plane,’ ‘I’ve got to go to Mass.’ But I never in my life heard anybody say they had to go back to prison.”

I was rushing into my clothes. I kissed her, hastily, sloppily, and ran from the room, crying over my shoulder, “I’ll see you! I’ll call you!” And as I left I could see her in the light of the bedside lamp, sitting up, shaking her head.

I ran. I ran through ankle-deep snow, with more snow still coming down, all the way back to the Dombey house.