Time and Tied
An investigative reporter gets … hmm. From Waist Not, Want Knot
Time and Tied1
Far from it. That’s where to be when it happens. No need to get involved. Far from it. Unless, of course, your intent is to report on it, in which case “close” is usually preferable. How close being the question, tempered by exactly what “it” is. Jordan is a reporter, so the issue of distance is of no little import.
Conjugation of paramecia is an up-close and personal sort of thing2. You want your eyes smack dab on the upper end of the microscope.
Nuclear detonations? Not so much.
This story takes place in that ever gray area between simple sex and atomic fusion. Note that while population explosions may be somewhat less fiery than nuclear they are no less far-reaching, making the “gray area between” rather narrower than one might expect at first glance.
In either case it is generally best to hold oneself at one remove, emotionally, if fairness and accuracy is the goal. A biologist too bound up in the sturm und drang of the love lives of slipper-shaped freshwater ciliate protozoans is clearly taking things too far. (Naming them Shawn and Lee, while appropriately gender neutral, and adding details about their honeymoon, will not fly in a peer reviewed paper for Nature. Trust me on this.) As too, emotional engagement is a problem for a president who worries overmuch about humans inhabiting ground zero. After all, they won’t be voting in the next election.
Jordan’s quarry? I expected that question from a reader of your obvious depth and perspicacity, so I’m well prepared to bob and weave. All you need to know is that it is a matter of profound importance, and extremely difficult of discovery. And dangerous. We should never overlook dangerous.
Jordan spent a full two weeks in a large urban library (the location of which cannot be identified here for reasons of national security) doing background research. To throw off anyone who might have been tracing her movements she pulled volumes from a wide range of subject areas. First a gardening tome, then a textbook for apprentice electricians, next two histories of the Mexican American War, a catalog of antique clocks, travel guides to Europe and Asia as well as an Audubon guide to Western bird species and a scattering of magazines—all lay open on the table before her, together with three other “less general interest” whose titles and subject matter are best not related in a public document.
Her notes were kept on a regular reporter’s spiral pad, and jotted down in a code she had invented for the very purpose. Any absconder in possession of the thing, reading by flashlight in a remote cabin or cave, would learn nothing of use. The code is so finely wrought that it doesn’t even appear to be a code!
For example (in Jordan’s fine hand):
In the course of the M-A war, some 274,000 men served in the U.S. military, of which 5,462 died, only 379 of whom died of battle-inflicted wounds. The others died of disease, many of food poisoning due to a shipment to the army by Armour & Co. of 500,000 pounds of bad beef. Cans actually exploded.3
You would be perfectly in order to assume that this section of her notes, verbatim, is about the Mexican American War and the sad fate of soldiers who ate bad beef. But it isn’t! Embedded in what appears to be a straight-forward account is the information Jordan needed to precisely locate the perpetrators of a heinous and …
Well, we can’t go there at this point. Someday the history will be written, as it always is, and the truth will out. But for now, we certainly don’t want anyone killed. Do we? No indeed.
Further on she writes:
The use of neonicotinoid pesticides has sharply reduced the population of pollinators globally. The clearest proof has emerged in France, where widespread adoption of organic agriculture has resulted in a resurgence of the wild and domestic bee populations.4
Again you may be fooled into thinking this is about farming and pollination, whereas it provides Jordan with the names, addresses, credit card numbers and Socials of both principals in the aforementioned and deeply sinister affair.
For all her two weeks invested in perusal, the notes amounted to only four pages, yet they contained everything she needed to successfully tackle her assignment.
Time well spent, I would say.
Unfortunately it seems she then proceeded to get a little too close to her subject(s).
When she came to she was securely bound, hands and feet, gagged of course, and realized she was looking at the bottom of a box spring. There was no evidence of others, no sound of foot steps, no voices. She realized she was lucky to not be dead, though of course she is perspicacious enough to realize that if she had been that unlucky she wouldn’t know of it.
This is the sort of dawning that, when it graces us, gives us all hope. Conscious awareness is always the last guest at the party. Our brain circuitry is not instantaneous. Things happen and then, a very short time later, we know they happened.
Take this experiment for example. When I’m typing this story on my laptop, I tend to think that the letters on the screen appear “instantly” as I tap. In fact there is a tiny delay. Electrical impulses are not instantaneous. A very clever researcher enlisted some experienced typists who were assigned to type away on computers. Then he meddled with the software such that the time lag between finger action and appearance gradually increased by several milliseconds over the course of a few days. Typists’ continued to interpret the appearance as “instantaneous.” No surprise there.
But here’s the really amazing bit. After typists became accustomed to the new, slightly longer delay, when the software was suddenly switched back to normal, all of the people tested had the very unsettling but very real sensation that the letters were appearing on the screen before their fingers hit the keys!5
The upshot is that when you die, you won’t be around to experience it, when your no longer extant consciousness would have told you about it, a few milliseconds after the fact. You won’t know you died!
Where were we? Or rather, where was Jordan? Under a bed, if memory serves.
Problem. Should she move? Assuming she could. (Which she found she could, being bound but not bound to anything.) Fortunately she was not naked, saying which might have made this story more exciting, but I try to stick to facts.
Were the perps still near? How long had she been out? They must have drugged her because she felt a bit woozy but didn’t feel banged or bruised.
She scooted over a bit and could see that daylight shone through a window. It had been past dusk when they … gotta be careful here regarding pronoun references … when “they” met. When what transpired transpired. When what eventuated eventuated.
That clearly had to be many hours ago. The duct tape on her mouth felt horrible; she didn’t want to endure it any longer than necessary. Besides, they hadn’t killed her when they could have, so maybe she should take a chance.
Jordan squirmed and scooted out from under the bed and surveyed the motel room, for that’s what it turned out to be. A depressingly cheap motel room. The print hanging above the bed was a wretched reproduction of an equally wretched painting. Some hoteliers have no taste. That goes for perps as well. And don’t get her started on the balance of the décor. Chartreuse? Really? Really? This was starting to look like a bad crime novel.
She rubbed her face in the carpet until a corner of the tape pulled away from her skin and she was gradually able to scrape it off.
Then she sat up, scooted to the window, rolled up onto her knees and peered out. The parking lot was all but empty. No sign whatever of the blue … let’s just say, “vehicle.” So they were gone. The sound of a maid trundling her cart down the corridor made it clear that it was past check-out time.
In a few minutes Jordan could hear the woman working in the room next door, and a short while later there was a key in the door and the maid stepped in.
“I’m in a bit ...” Jordan began, intending to complete the sentence “of a bind.” As a professional journalist, she almost always completes her sentences—and accurately, I might add.
But the maid ran away shrieking.
Shortly thereafter a manager arrived.
“What do you think you’re doing here?”
“I don’t know. I ...”
“Check out was two hours ago.”
“You see, I ...”
“You’re tied up! In my motel! This is so wrong.”
“I have to agree. I ...”
“How does this make me look? If this gets into the papers!”
“Actually I’m a reporter.”
“Oh, great.”
“Could you untie me? I’d really appreciate it.”
“I’ll have to think.”
The manager stepped out of the room, and locked the door behind him.
*****
Note: Substack starts footnote numbers anew each time I paste in a story. But footnotes are wildly important and sometimes refer back to previous matters, so I’ve thoughtfully put the correct numbers in brackets, like so [#].
1 [68] Weight for no man. Or woman for that matter, though she’s more likely to eat sensibly, in my experience.
2 [69] Some would say “prurient.” Eye of the beholder applies here.
3 [70] True fact. See Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States page 309 for a fuller account.
4 [71] Another true fact! As GW Bush asked, “Is our children learning?”
5 [72] Those of you who were lucky enough to read Seize You on the Dark Side of the Moo, Brave Ulysses Books, 2019, will realize that I told this story there as well. But, remember, not everyone is an A-List reader. This information about consciousness is important. Share it widely.
****
Copyright© 2020, Cecil Bothwell, All rights reserved.
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