The responding officer, Detective Norway, had burst through the door with a bunch of henchmen behind him and they made a great scene in the foyer of Leslie’s apartment. Screaming and shouting and brandishing weapons, they told her to get on the floor and ran right into the kitchen. “My television is this way, boys. Can’t you help me?”
“Get on your knees!” they responded in unison. Leslie stared silently at them and pointed to her television—black and empty and looking like a relic discovered in some bomb shelter years after the inhabitants turned to dust.
“I can’t see how that will fix my TV,” she said absently, but she complied. From the kitchen, she’d heard retching sounds, and cries of “my god,” and “disgusting!” and more vomiting. The smell was horrendous. When Norway stormed back into the living room, his beard twitched beneath his nose and his bunched-up face had the appearance of a pug that had been slammed into a wall repeatedly.
“Cuff her.”
The other officers complied. “But there must be some mistake. I called you to help with my television. Why, I haven't been able to watch TV or get on the internet for almost three hours. Do something!” But the bracelets were locked around her wrists and the cops shoved her face into the rancid carpet, stained with soot and food and urine. “Help!” she screamed. “I’m being kidnapped! What are you even charging me with?”
“Leslie Roman, you are hereby placed under arrest for cruelty to animals, gross and reckless endangerment, and violating the terms and conditions of microwave usage.” Norway’s voice sounded choked, as if his throat was clogged with half chewed food. His eyes brimmed and shone red in the earlier afternoon light filtering in through the windows. He looked like a monster to Leslie.
“But I need to get my TV working. Will I be back before the evening news?”
“No.”
“Okay. I’d rather stay.”
No one listened to her. She was thrown into a room with another officer who interrogated her like she was a terrorist. Yet all she wanted to know was the man’s birthday.
"What's your birthday?" she kept asking them. Officer Norway and Federal Agent Lampost sat across. They were aware she had asked everyone in the cell the same question.
Officer Norway responded to her, "December 23 is my birthday."
"You're a cusper. You're a Sage-Cap cusper. "
"A what?"
"Sagittarius-Capricorn."
"Oh."
"You have the same birthday as Donna Prima. So exciting."
Lampost stared at her with a mix between horror and confusion. She knew what he was thinking: this crone is mad! Only she wasn’t mad, not really. She cleared her throat and realized the scientists were still staring intently at her.
“The electrical consumption should not have been more than that of a frozen dinner, but perhaps I miscalculated the nuclear capacity of the teleportation. I sent a biological object to decipher the plasma endurance…" Leslie mumbled to herself.
The authorities weren’t sure if she was crazy. The four other officers that stormed the door with Norway picked her up by the crux of her elbows and dragged her through the door of her apartment, into the hall where peering eyes poked out of barely-opened doorways and whispers followed in her wake. Norway was one of those cops who dared to do anything. He had seen dead bodies in all sorts of positions — mangled, crushed, in jars.
Norway saw the shadow in the Kenmore Microwave. There was something eerie about this microwave. It was old. Really old. Like great grandfather old. Something that belonged in a museum. There weren't buttons. But there was knob. It required a twist to indicate how long a selected dinner had to be heated to pass off as edible. The shadow did not move. Or did it? He couldn't tell. His hand was trembling. When he opened it, he saw two eyes, brown skin, a shriek that cut into his forehead like a knife.
"Oh shit," he almost shot at the gerbil, as it burst out of the microwave.
******
Leslie laughed a little remembering it all and how ridiculous the situation was. All she wanted now was to get out of here.
“And that’s when I met Reinhold. Your man.”
The scientists stared at Leslie and she didn’t know why they had such bland looks on their faces. Donna Prima never looked so boring. Leslie wanted nothing more than to be away from the company of these bores and back with her television—if it even worked —and learning about what was truly important in the world.
“Yes, and this Mr. Walker. I understand you had a lengthy discussion with him?”
Concannon, whose voice had been stern and bellicose when he began questioning Leslie, now sounded like a child. His eyes brimmed too. Leslie wondered if allergy season was beginning a little early this year.
“He was such a doll. He was. They had me in this tiny room with nothing, but a table and two chairs and they kept offering me cigarettes, but I don’t smoke, and I just kept saying, ‘Can I go now. Donna’s waiting.’” Leslie frowned remembering the cops hadn’t liked that. None of them spoke. The light that hung from the ceiling swung slowly back and forth and their cigarette smoke made the whole room fill up and smell like something died in there.
“That’s when Mr. Walker came in. He walked right up to those stubborn cops and said he was taking me away, back to my home because they really had no proof that I did the things they said I did and he used a lot of words I didn’t understand.”
She tapped her fingers in a rolling, rhythmic motion on the sheen surface of the conference table and noticed neither the scientists’ disdain for her story or the way in which Drivol’s, the only female scientist there, neck muscles tensed up at Leslie’s nervous actions. Veins reached up from her collar to clutch at her jaw and her lips shut tight against the shout that was building in her throat. Richter found an itch on the back of his head and scratched repeatedly and fervently, all the while watching the way Leslie tapped her fingers and bit her lips and cast her eyes about. Only Concannon looked grave and stalwart.
“Go on,” he said.
******
Leslie was back at the time of her release, the crowds waiting for her outside of the municipal building, full of people shouting hateful words and pelting her and the lawyer leading her with balled up newspapers from the days and weeks and months before and when the two—lawyer and accidental inventor—sat across from each other in the quietude of the limousine, Reinhold Walker began a conversation with the popping of a champagne bottle and two glasses. “Mrs. Roman, you are about to be a very rich woman. What is more, you are about to be very powerful.”
Leslie didn’t understand. She wanted only to get a glimpse of the horror show that Donna Prima’s jawline must have become at the hands of the Turkish surgeons and she cut him off with a question: “Is my TV working? Are you from the repair team?”
Reinhold Walker looked baffled at the insane woman sitting across from him and eventually put her glass of champagne on the table between them. The limousine rolled through the streets and bore its way through the city’s tunnels, but not a drop ran over the rim of the glass. “No. I am with Legacy, LLC. You may have heard of us.” She registered no recognition of the name. “We are a research firm. Research and Development, and we always keep a keen ear out for stories like yours. They judge now. They point and scrutinize. You boiled a hamster in its own skin after all. It popped. But such is the way of advancement. It is not our place at Legacy, LLC. to make moral judgements. We only see that you have invented a teleportation device that would propel our human race to a new era.”
“It was a gerbil.”
“Excuse me?”
“It was a gerbil. Not a hamster.”
“Either way, gerbils and hamsters have had their day. Now it is time for ours. And you are going to help us get there.”
“Neat.” She felt very tired all of a sudden. Her eyes wandered from the lawyer with the crooked nose and angular jaw, slicked back hair and gleaming eyes, suit and—she was sure, though she could see—fancy shoes. Even his posture as he threw his arms out to his side over the headrests beside him and crossed his legs—girl style—beneath the table made Leslie want nothing more than to jump from the vehicle and splatter in the street. The buildings they snaked through stretched so far into the sky they seemed to arch above them and seal in those below, like the bars of a birdcage. A light rain fell. She saw a Donna Prima billboard advertising oral cleansing foam and she brightened up for a minute, but as the next building slipped in front of it and blocked her view, Leslie felt herself fade again.
“All I need from you, Leslie, is a signature.”
“A signature?” The lawyer slid a file over the table past Leslie’s untouched champagne glass and opened the cover. Big, bold, red letters on the first page read: Nondisclosure and Confidentiality Agreement.
She made no movement. Reinhold Walker, who had seemed so slick earlier, now grew agitated and his lips bent into a wolf’s snarl. “If you write your name on that line, I’ll bring you back to your apartment and if the power’s on, we can watch the Donna Prima reveal.”
Leslie smiled, picked up the file, flipped through the pages and said to Walker, “I’ll need a pen.”
******
“And then he brought me here, sirs. And ma’am. So, you can see why I am more than a little peeved to be still sitting here.” Leslie flashed yellowing teeth and the scientists huddled together in secret conference, across the table from her. “Not that you aren’t wonderful company.”
A new man had joined the ranks of the learned men across from her and she scarcely noticed his presence until they broke from their huddle and he stared directly at her, with a smile and voice that melted in her ears like simmering chocolate. “We do understand, Leslie. You can go,” the senior Vice President of the Legacy Limited Liability Corporation, Fred Armacost said. He winked at her and when she didn’t move, he repeated, “It’s okay. You have been a most enlightening guest. We will be in touch regarding your—discoveries.”
Leslie, who had expected no such treatment from such a high-ranking member of this strange science team, repeatedly blinked in surprise before slowly rising to her feet, muttering to herself, “Donna Prima. Donna. Prima. Probably missed it already. Would have to watch highlight reels. The laundry will be so much harder now that they took my microwaves.”
When she left the conference room and the doors slid shut with a whoosh of cold air behind her, the four scientists sat in silence, brooding over the revelations that had been made by the most inexplicable and unlikely person: Leslie Roman. Before even the smell of stale urine dissipated in her wake, Armacost spoke up in a hushed tone, to ensure that no listening devices or prying ears could make out his words, forcing the others to come in close for a huddle.
“She is a genius.”
“She is a lunatic,” Drivol replied, her face bending into an expression of hideous fascination.
“They all are,” Armacost countered. “In one hoarder’s living room, we have found a teleportation device, a power bar that has fed her for over a month, an ointment containing undiscovered microorganisms that have already—in the span of hours—been proven to rebuild damaged neural tissue. I am speechless.”
“We must get these discoveries out, boss,” Richter said.
“Never.” Concannon’s voice had the sharpness of a steel blade and his eyes glinted. His voice shook as he spoke, and he clutched his collar as if the air conditioner had stalled and the heat of summer had crept in through the vents.
“Concannon’s right,” Armacost said. “If these discoveries see the light of day, we are finished. If these discoveries see the light of that fucking do-gooder’s office at Apologia, we’re finished. If she runs her mouth to the wrong person on the subway, we’re finished. Need I go on?”
“So, what do we do?” Drivol asked.
“Protocol Nine.”
“Sir, that’s—we can’t do—”
“I said, Protocol Nine.”
The three scientists stared at each other and the VP stared at nothing. Silence reigned in the room. Only Concannon seemed pleased.
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