Officer… Lindstrom. Her badge catches the sun, and I’m blinking the spot from my eyes when she looks up at me from her small pad of lined paper. “And when did you first see the car?” Her notes are a disconcerting scribble. Do I really talk like that?

Perhaps I could read what she’s writing if I spoke more elegantly. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t fight it. “Ghkklllrrrrgghhh, thrbblll ffkkkggggg.”

“I’m sorry, what was that?”

“I said it was around three in the morning,” I say. I look beyond the front porch to where the mystery car sat idling last night. Gone now. “Just before three, maybe.”

She stops writing. “How much before?” she asks. A stickler. Just then she’s hit with a yawn, and it’s one of those yawns that involve every muscle in the face and neck. And while she is helpless I peer into her mouth, positioning my head to get the best view.

By the time her eyes return from the recesses of her skull the illusion is already shattered–officer Lindstrom is nothing but meat. She can play servant of the peace all she wants, but she is no more than a beast in uniform. This thought inevitably leads me back to myself, and I become uncomfortable as I think about organic components strung together, vital processes pushing out hair and sebum, eating and evacuating…. I’ve stopped breathing again, and nearly fall over for lack of oxygen.

I don’t like to think of myself in that context. It’s not that I fancy myself more than the sum of my parts; I hold no such illusion. I prefer to think of myself–my person–as being made up of a single uniform material, like luncheon meat. The actions and motivations of officer Lindstrom here are determined by chemical, by instinct, by genetic imperative. I, on the other hand, am pure thought riding around within a tangible carapace. Rather like a corndog, I suppose.

From the dawn of thought I’ve been fascinated by systems. Not just physical bodies, but by environments, workplaces, and living quarters. Each one is a unique sculpture of will, a shrine to a given process. In a public place my attention is often held rapt by the momentary glimpses of the office beyond an employee door. A whiteboard smeared with the blue of changing shift schedules. Worn clipboards pinching sheaves of inventory sheets. Or V-shaped notches in teeth after years of gnawing… what?

In the midst of this activity that I cannot possibly fathom, my fantasy involves recklessly insinuating myself into some procedural chain, undaunted by my complete ignorance. “Gimme that,” I would say to the stultified worker drone. “Let me show you how a professional does it.” And I grab the shoe horn, or the blast shields, or the stainless steel calipers, or the strap-on baby mask, or the novelty vomit, or the environment-safe glitter, or the sock puppets with blue button-eyes, or the machine that goes ping, or your mother, and I just start doing whatever the job requires as if it were second nature to me. What one man can do another man can do, isn’t that how it goes? At least until the authorities do their thing.

But now, aren’t people the most inscrutable systems of all? Acting and responding, picking stuff up and putting it down, idling their cars outside my house in the middle of the night, and writing my every word on a leaf of notebook paper, albeit not very clearly. “Never mind,” I say.

The creature who is officer Lindstrom looks up at me again. “What never mind?”

I shake my head. “I made the whole thing up.”

Her arms fall by her sides, pen and pad forgotten. “Sir, look…. Would you mind explaining why you made the report this morning?”

“Because,” I say, and shrug. That’s really all there is to it.