David Brendan O'Meara
My Way to Canossa
Episode 54: Innocence
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Episode 54: Innocence

In which the Blogger decides he'd rather hide than talk to the police one more time.

Innocence

29 April 2009, 3:57 a.m.
48° 34' 53.91" N, 7° 45' 1.10" E

It’s 4 a.m., and I’ve been walking around Strasbourg for an hour. Three times I’ve been stopped, by three different cop cars, petites voitures de police, little minivans that pull up next to me and offer to help.

“I’m innocent!” I want to shout at them. “I didn’t do it. It’s not possible!”

But instead I explain that I have jet lag, and I just slept for thirteen hours after not sleeping for two days, and I need to walk to get myself tired again, so I can sleep another couple of hours and get back on schedule.

All three times, the cops have been very helpful and reassuring. They tell me that I don’t look like a criminal, which means, I suppose, that I look like a crime victim. They know I’m an American before I even open my mouth. Are my clothes that obvious? My body language?

I’m completely sober, I tell them. I’m not looking for drugs or sex. I’m not going to get mugged. I just need to walk.

The cops all speak very good English. One tells me to avoid Rue X, where skinheads from Port du Rhin have been known congregate, another says to watch out for Quai Y, where the gypsy pickpockets ply their trade, and the last one made me promise to stay away from Place des Zed, where some backpackers suspected of anarchist sympathies like to camp. Each time I thank them, and promise to keep my wallet in my front pocket. Then they pull away, and I continue on my walk, a respectable citizen of the world, an innocent international traveler availing himself of the calm streets of a safe city for a recuperative walk in the wee hours.

It’s a good story, but I don’t believe a word of it. In my gut, I don’t feel innocent at all. What I feel is desperately, mortally guilty.

This is the longest it’s lasted—the longest I’ve felt this way—after the dream. Normally all I have to do is wash my face, and my innocence returns. But not tonight.

You see, I have this recurring dream—well I can’t really call it recurring, it’s not even the same dream—it’s always different, always unique, always sneaks up on me. But it always ends the same way—with me waking up, trembling with guilt and fear. That’s ridiculous, isn’t it?

It always starts in some other dream. A boring dream. I’m engaged in some trivial, repetitive activity, tying my shoes maybe, or re-shelving books at the library, or folding and unfolding some kind of collapsible object, when an overwhelming anxiety, a moral dread, comes out of nowhere and attaches itself to whatever I’m doing and I find myself thinking: I must do this well, I must do this faster, or... it will all come out!

And then the activity becomes impossibly difficult: the shoelaces grow longer and longer in my hands, the carts of unshelved books multiply around me, the collapsible object twists and turns into a snake... Shit. That was a bad one—the one with the snake. I shouldn’t have thought about that.

Tonight. I’ll think about tonight.

It was definitely night when the dream came, I’m sure of that. I had woken up, all groggy, and made my way downstairs to the shared bathroom to take a piss—I had been sleeping all day, but it was completely dark by then. I had to wait for this Swiss backpacker to finish using the w.c., and I looked out the window. The street was dark. Definitely dark. I’m positive. I don’t know why I’m so concerned about whether it was day or night, except that maybe if this turned out to be one of those weird dreams that attack you during afternoon naps, maybe I could dismiss the entire experience. But it doesn’t work that way. It always happens to me at night.

So tonight, what I was doing, after I pissed and climbed back up to my room and into that dusty bed—I found myself cleaning and reconnecting the tapper lines on the BierWagen. Now I’ve never cleaned beer tapper lines in my life, and as far as I know, the BierWagen doesn’t have any lines to clean—the only tapper I saw just went straight into a barrel—but beer aficionados are always talking about cleaning the lines, and how important clean lines are for good draft beer, and I’ve been to a few after-hours parties in the basement of a bar. This was a long time ago, before I got married, when the library had me working a night shift, minding the new database server, which was very touchy, by the way, and I’d get off at midnight, and a couple, three times a week I’d stop at this tavern near my apartment, where there was an after-work crowd from a nearby emergency room. A fun group, usually buzzed with energy from saving or losing lives. Eventually I became enough of a regular that if I was still around at last call, I’d get invited to the after-hours party in the basement, and the beer lines loomed over us in the dim light, like the rigging of some pirate ship.

Those lines must have made an impression on me, because in my dream tonight they connected themselves to the tappers in the BierWagen, and it was my job to clean them. Of course I accepted the assignment, in the agreeable manner I usually have in dreams. Next thing I knew there were dozens of disconnected beer lines curling around me, clean and dirty and frothy and sparkling, and I thought: I’d better connect these to their original tappers, and that’s when the anxiety arrived.

Suddenly I realized I had to do it right, and I had to do it fast, and I had to do it now, because otherwise I would be caught.

Fuck. There’s another cop car. Where the hell am I? Is this the Cathedral? Is that a gargoyle?

I don’t want to talk to the cops again, so I step into the shadows, and hide.


Next episode: Jakob and Josef

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