Michael Seidlinger - The Strangest

I am passed around like the file folder, from officer to officer, as they took down more information. One officer wanted to know about my ethnicity, wanted to know about my hometown.

I answered but it didn’t seem to be correct.

None of the officers bothered to tell me anything.

Another officer asks me what it felt like.

I could see my breath in the air. I tell him, “cold.”

That’s also not the sort of answer the officer wanted. The officer starts talking to me about how guns affect the human body. How the bullet lodges in and if the tip of the bullet is filed down and cut before use, it will actually splinter upon impact, causing more harm.

I don’t look at the officer, instead staring down at what he has in hand.

File folder. The document.

He holds on to it like it like it’s useless information.

Passed to another officer, she pushes me to the floor when I don’t understand her instructions. I feel dizzy, I can’t seem to do the “right thing.”

She flips open the file folder, reads the document for a second and then calls me, “One sick and strange motherfucker.”

The way she says it causes me to clam up, a knot in my throat that won’t go down even though I try to clear my throat.

She says, “Don’t make me hit you again.”

She continues reading and then, like I wasn’t there, went back to whatever she was watching on her phone.

I look at the phone.

I look at it like it should have been mine.

Even after she notices and tells me to stop looking at the screen, my eyes fixate on its glow. I think about all of my friends and followers, the comments waiting to be commented on, the likes unnumbered. I think about the brand built and I think about what I would type right now.

I come up empty. Nothing I wouldn’t delete moments later.

The officer places her phone screen-down on the desk and forces me up to my feet. I am returned to the holding cell.

There are 25 people here.

I find my place on the bars.

It’s like I haven’t left this place.

Sometime during the night, we hear someone whistling. The whistling gets closer. It is never worth considering anything more than the whisper. The source could only be someone here to get one of us, and this time, the first in a dozen, the whistling officer is here to get me.

Simple gesture of the hand, jingle of the keys, sliding the door open, officer with one hand on the weapon, just in case anyone still bothered trying to resist, and outside of the cell. Into the hall.

He walks me like the others, cuffed and held by the arm with enough force to tell me that I am not going where I want to go.

I am still back in that holding cell.

I have nowhere to go, but there are more rooms I have yet to enter, and this one looks like it might be the one where I never return. We walk in a straight line and the officer talks to me like he’s talking to someone he’s spoken to before.

Whistle. “So how’s your day?”

I don’t say anything.

“Can’t be that great then.” By the way he whistles, it must be a good day. A good day to be an officer.

“Making sense of any of this?”

When I look, he is looking at me. The officer must be in a good mood. In trying to find some sort of routine, I had thought that we don’t look at officers, especially when they speak to us. We look elsewhere. We stand when we are supposed to stand; we speak when we are supposed to speak.

I don’t speak for anyone. I don’t assume anything that hasn’t already been assumed of me.

“It seems I’m considered bad,” I say, not too loud but he hears me.

Whistle, “It does seem that way. Kind of led us to think that, though.”

I hear myself saying, “I’m behind.”

“Behind, huh?”

“There’s been so much activity and I haven’t posted, I haven’t typed.”

“Not many opportunities for that where you’re going.”

The officer whistles, swings the file folder in his free hand.

Every few steps I glance over in its direction.

I ask, “What’s next?”

Between whistles, the officer says, “Onward and upward.” A whistle, “But first things first.”

I used to be up-to-date and quick with my reply.

I had a routine, a routine that is now splintered, broken.

Now I am led instead of allowed to walk.

I am not treated like an equal. I am barely worth talking to.

Everyone else that’s cuffed looks inward, not outward. They walk with their eyes unfocused, their minds on something a couple steps back. Everything is a mark, a blow dealt long before the feeling is registered. I can understand how I’d say it, but when I get around to saying it, it feels like everything has already been said for me. I have no place to explain myself.

People do all the explaining.

Everything else is a formality.

He stops me at the door, before I am led into the room.

Explanations for the unexplained:

“You won’t fit in here. Not like that.” Whistle. “You’re going to have to be processed. It’s what I call it but everyone’s got their own terms. Same thing, same effect. Your alleged criminal offenses will be put to trial. Same as always. But you’re not going back out there. You’re going in — cell of your own.” I must have done something to make it seem like I didn’t understand.

The officer opens the file folder, looks at the first page.

That’s my photo.

That is my name.

Homicide.

He stops whistling at that point. He reads from the file, never again looking in my direction. “If you are not assigned a lawyer, you will be given a court-appointed attorney …”

More is said, less and less is understood.

He asks me, “How could you do something like that?”

Another officer walks up, there to take me forward. He answers for me, “Society’s a cruel place and we caught ourselves a cruel person.”

I’m led into the room. The officer continues to whistle once I’m gone.

The file is now with another officer. They make me hand over everything in my pockets. I don’t have anything but a wallet. I had my phone but, like a good portion of what I had carried, it had been misplaced. I am in the process of trying to catch up. Don’t know if I can.

It’s not looking good.

Then I am told to hand over my shirt.

My pants are next.

The officer walks over and stops at yet another door, “Inside.”

For them this is routine.

The officer throws a white powder that burns as it settles on my skin. Then water pours down from above. The shower is strong enough that I see whole sheets of dirt and dead skin fall from my body.

An itchy towel is given to me.

“Wipe yourself,” the officer says.

“Over here,” he commands.

I walk back to where I had been told to disrobe.

“Put it on.” The simplicity of each command is enough to blur the reason for my incarceration. I hadn’t thought much of my crimes and I wouldn’t until I had sat in my own cell, waiting for what would not come.

Waiting for the sheer force of hoping that there was something else.

At least at this very moment, there is something. I am not left to my thoughts. I am forced to wear what I am given.

I am given not a name but a number.

I tell the officer that I am good at numbers.

“Shut up.”

He won’t even look in my direction.

There’s a mirror across from me.

What I see doesn’t immediately strike me as alarming but then I see the orange of the garment, feel the heavy fabric on my shoulders. I see the number given to me; I see the way my face looks when I try to make different faces.