When the mind is a prison, who pays for issary?

  Cooper had been sitting in the cell for hours, maybe even days, wracked by a stant stream of daydreams and ed by a gurgling of tradiemories, squeezing his eyes closed against his headache and trying to wake himself up. His ears were still ringing from the gunfire and he could smell it everywhere, despite the ge of clothes (his own clothes, spshed in dried blood had been pced in a pstic evidence bag), so the smell must have seeped into his skin and hair. Every time a cell door smmed shut, he heard a gunshot. At some point, he might have made a phone call, but at least six different versations with as many tacts, from family to street associates to pledges, jostled fitima his memory. A few times, he called and got a mae or a dial tohat got louder until he hung up the phone. Oime, it had been himself oher lirying to warn him about another world and hunters who didn’t believe in dying.

  Eventually, the cops came in. Their stoitry, the solid sharp metal screech of the door, fttened by the painted crete bricks, even the angur sts, cologne and gasolihat they brought with them, all broke the soft, ephemeral, surfaces of his halluations, which dissipated like soap bubbles a Cooper alone in the square space of the room.

  “Alright Mr. Davidson,…”

  The cop's voice seemed to suck the reality that had so exactly filled the room moments aght back out again, and Cooper was filled with the idea that outside the walls was an endless dark void, and the view through the small gss regle that seemed to show a hallway and at times a passing head, was really a small s beyond which was, of course, the void. The cops were agents of this void. If they stepped out again, they would dissolve, and be void once more.

  “Right down the hall…” The cop grabbed him by the elbow and lead him towards the door. He didn’t feel himself stand and it seemed the room dropped down and the door came towards him. Suddenly, He got the idea that he was made of the same stuff as the room, as the cop’s clothes, as the dust in the ers, and that uheir skin they were just more void. The universe, it seemed, was made of two kinds of matter; Void and Cooper. This sensation persisted as they drug him out in the hall, where, after the shock of finding the hallway just as the s had portrayed it subsided, he realized that because he was made of the same stuff as everything else in the world, he was thus bound by its rules. Therefore,

  “I’m going to fug prison.”

  The interrogation room reminded him of unity college. Carpet patterned like an image zoomed in too close. Card table desks topped with ptops, pens and coffee cups in various stages of their life cycle on the cop side, bottled water and tissue box on his. They sat across from him in frayed creaking office chairs that may have even doime in an academic advisor's office, and spoke in the same desding authoritative tone as every desk monkey he’d ever ied with, from high school to the court system, just enough niess on the edges to let you know there’s another level we go to if you don’t py ball.

  “Are you familiar with this house?”

  puter paper photo of Jo Jo’s cousin’s ex’s pce. Memories drifted out of it like an old smell kicked up by digging through the back of a closet or something. He and Jo Jo had gone in while Jo Jo was on lunch break from that bar on 7th, or maybe it was the chi pagnolia. Either way, it hadn’t taken long. Chris, Jo Jo’s cousin’s ex, was out with Sophie (Jo Jo’s cousin, hot little Latina who had said Cooper had “wounded eyes” or some shit) at a work thing, and Jo Jo had called Cooper the moment he heard about it.

  “This TCU dipshit threw a Yeti cup at her fug head and now she’s out with him “w”.”

  So, they had gone in, got two ptops (one Mac they had mag wiped while still inside), some watches, Pystation, colognes, rings, something Cooper had thought was a router but Jo Jnized as a Hydrogen crypto miner or some shit, and anything else they could fit in tacks, including a half-gotle of scotch with a hat made Cooper want to rob the guy just for making him try to pronou.

  But, Cooper just shook his head, said No sir, and tried to steer the versation towards the violent shootout that had left multiple cops dead and had seemed to ter around him.

  For some reason, the cops weren’t ied.

  “We brought Jo Jo in for assault st week, so cut the shit—”

  They walked him through how Jo Jo had run his mouth to some friends, how the Mac had been harder to fehahought, how Jo Jo had told his cellmate (sure he had. And the cellmate had just been vely looking to lighten a sentence, right?) about a friend of his who beat some old boomer in the head with a fshlight in the middle of a b and e.

  They had shown him photos of the guy in a hospital bed, which was kinda pointless because it had been pitch bck when Cooper bopped him with the Maglite so he wouldn’t know him from anybody anyway, but it got the point across.

  Then, suddenly, the versation had turned, like a dog stopping to sniff something that to everyone else looked like just another patch of grass, and not just any dog but a poliaybe ohat had been previously running after a serial killer or something, towards the topic of the fshlight bludgeoned boomer’s colle.

  “Does this look familiar?” The cop said it like ying a trap. Like tying Cooper to the leather a book of quarters he was now dispying a picture of was the height of police ing, despite the aovie shootout he had just been plucked from and homend security level threats surely moving around the city right about now.

  “I’m fug dreaming,” Ched.

  “Keep telling yourself that,” The cop or detective or whatever he was, said. His voice was made of the same stuff as the void, but energized, like sand swept up from around your feet aed into a razor.

  The uy, maybe deg that things weren’t fusing enough yet, went on to tell Cooper that they could get his sentence reduced if he let them know where he had stashed the quarters. The old man was ready to drop the charges. He just wanted his s, ho.

  He had gone quiet, so the first cop with the void voice had said his name, like a punch.

  “Cooper?”

  Something in it broke everything in half. While one half went off and muttered to itself about plea deals and snitches, the other Cooper tried to remember how he got here.

  Who was I?

  Asked like, “Now where was I?”, after being interrupted, as if the cops and the murder were just loud noises out ireet breaking up a gentle night's rest. He saw himself robbing houses aing seniors for half dolrs and shook his head.

  “No, who was I? I’m not a thief, I don’t even speed, I—”

  He saw another him, somewhere quiet, the same way this world was loud, terminally online, waiting for something, hoping for something, and for an instaepped ihat other him, like putting on an old jacket, and the feelings, if not the memories, were kicked up like old smells and swirled around him. Like stepping into a quiet room in a raging party, and realizing you weren’t as drunk as you thought. Like dreaming your life had goo ruins, then waking—

  “All right, you just wanna sit there and ugh, we let you ugh in your cell,”

  The other him vanished, like shapes seen in the dark of near sleep, banished by an involuntary jolt.

  The cops or detectives or whatever they were said things about assault and attempted murder being worse than breaking aering, and the fleeting kindness of the battered boomer, and how this deal has an expiration date, and Cooper’s inability to do hard time, and so on, but none of the words struck him as hard as the loss of that other him, like the death of a loved one, or the sudden realization that the o of a terminal illness has severed your lives into two halves, forever.

  He found himself ba his cell, the cop’s warning that “We’re getting a warrant” boung in his head, like the whole thing had been a bad dream. Maybe it had been a dream. If they were gonna search his house for the quarters, why try and make a deal? The quarters were there,

  weren’t they?

  Warning: When thrown into a Hardworld by force, a Spirit may rea uable ways. ime, a cozy evening indoors. episode, Safehouse.