Electric catfish

After the thing with my neighbor and his dog I slept in my office again. I was tired, and after the thing with my neighbor's dog it seemed like a good idea.

I was tired, but as soon as I lay down on the sofa in my office, a switch went on and I couldn't sleep. Electricity; it was like some chemical thing; I don't know. My heart was racing. That rarely happened. I felt like one of the bottom-feeders Professor K kept in his aquarium, hyperkinetic expensive brown spotted tropical catfish he kept to clean the aquarium walls. They were nervous fish constantly on the lookout for something. Even when they were hiding out under a rock, they twitched and jerked. I totally knew how they felt. I tried to read something and gave up. I went into Professor K.'s office to watch his big aquarium for a while. That sometimes had a calming effect. Maybe I could transfer my electricity to those fish.

The office, an office building after everyone else goes home is a creepy place if you're into getting the creeps. I don't happen to be, but I could imagine someone getting a little unnerved by it. The staff, caretakers, cleaning ladies, they had all gone home; we didn't make much use of them anyway, K had too many secrets and didn't like them roaming the building unless someone else was there, at least Clark the orderly, although K preferred to be there himself, or Ike or Ng, one of his trusted people. He didn't trust me, I knew that, he was merely being realistic, why risk anything? And he didn't seem to trust Veronica either.

This all went through my head as I watched his fish. His business dealings, his cryptic telephone conversations. The aquarium was six feet long and three feet high, and the lights in its hood were the only lights on in the entire building except for the green emergency exit signs. A bottom feeder wriggled up and down the glass on the left side of the tank, pausing briefly to chase away another, smaller but otherwise identical bottom feeder until he was alone again.

As a certified sociopath, the first thing I did was calculate the risks to myself. What was the likelihood of getting caught, I wondered in any given situation. I was alone - I'd roamed the entire building. The automatic doors made enough noise that I'd hear anyone entering the building, especially since they'd have to unlock them. There were no surveillance cameras on this floor, only down in the lobby.

K. office was cool for the night. The air smelled fresh, no particular odor, no dust. He had a picture of a woman and two children on his desk. I'd seen the picture previously. He lived alone at his condo, so the picture was one of two things - ex-wife, or a fake to make him seem more human to customers, or merely to satisfy his need for obfuscation. They looked happy in the picture, so I couldn't imagine they actually had anything to do with K. who was so twisted he made a pretzel look straight.

He'd forgotten his attaché case on his desk. This struck me as a suspicious mistake on the part of someone so paranoid that he physically locked up his computer. I examined the smooth outside surface of the case, perfect for leaving fingerprints. I put on a pair of latex gloves and snapped it open.

That was the next odd thing - it wasn't locked. He must really have a lot on his mind to forget something like that. Then I opened the case, and about five hundred flies flew out and swarmed around the room.

Aha. I was busted. Where was I going to get five hundred flies at three o'clock in the morning? I walked over and closed the door. Then I examined the briefcase. Documents inside, but no fancy silent alarms or radio transmitters or anything. K. simply expected to return to his office, see the flies and know I'd been up to no good.

I stepped out of the office and closed the door behind me so no flies would get out. First I copied some documents from his briefcase at the copy machine in the hall. Then I walked briskly down the hall to the utility closet, and returned to K's office with five aerosol cans of air, which we used to clean the electronic equipment. They contained pure air, with a freon propellant. If you turned the can upside down, pure freon came out, which was freezing cold. I also had one can of poison.

Holding the first can of air upside down, I sprayed a fly on the wall and it's frozen body dropped to the floor. I placed it in a paper bag and went on to the next fly. A frozen fly took about five minutes to thaw out. In this manner, I went around the room freezing as many flies as I could catch.

After four minutes I had maybe fifty flies that would be thawing out soon. I opened the paper bag and sprayed some freon in to slow them down, then spent a few more minutes until I ran out of freon propellant. I had about one hundred flies. Then, holding my breath I sprayed the poison and killed the rest of the flies. I put the dead flies into the briefcase, and then shook the frozen ones in and closed the case.

Then I opened the office door and aired out the room, takinga few deep breaths out in the hallway. I didn't want the fish to die, which I assumed they would if the poisoned air circulated through their tank.

Then I went back to my office and read the copies. After reading them, I shredded them in my shredder. Then I shredded the shreds. I would have liked to shred the shreds another time, but they were too small to handle. Among the documents I'd copied was correspondence with the Silver Jewel Textile Factory in Pakistan, according to which dozens of Pakistani children were industriously assembling hundreds of "Sensation Suits" from lycra outer panels, with inner suits made of electrode-lined latex. The electrical components came from another company in Singapore.

There was also correspondence with someone in some Pentagon intelligence office. I was probably as dead as the flies in K's briefcase. I lay on my couch and for a few minutes watched the lights of jets landing at SeaTac. Then I fell asleep.

Posted by Mig at October 30, 2003 08:15 AM