The Three Dimensional Arm of the Law
LA3D Chapter 6
The police officer read me my rights and patted me down.
I tried to remember everything I had learned about the Law from watching television - Perry Mason re-runs, Judge Judy, LA Law... I barely remembered the charges for which I was being arrested: missed child support, two counts of attempted indecent liberties, assault, grand larceny of a cash machine, not-so-grand larceny, attempted shop-lifting, inciting a riot, violation of a bench warrant, contempt of court for failure to appear, failure to pay property taxes, felonious failure to pay parking tickets, walking while intoxicated, public lewdness, vagrancy, indecent behavior, attempted thinking without a license, pronoun misgendering, and several other violations I could not comprehend.
“Mr. Nash, you're going to have to take off the mittens, turn around, put your hands behind your back and let me cuff you before you get into the patrol car,” the officer said.
“But I...” I blustered.
The officer gave me a look and put his hand on his nightstick... “But you what?”
Szofia then stepped up to the policeman and with her hands reached up to pat me on my shoulder. “It's alright officer,” she said. “He just has, uh, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, you understand.”
The policeman looked at her menacingly. “So who are you, kid?”
“I'm, uh, I'm his daughter. He's a war vet, really badly messed up,” Szofia said, lightly tapping her green haired head. She gave the police man a knowing look lifting her green eyebrows a few times.
“Yeah? You're a veteran, Mr. Nash? Marines, regular army? Where'd you serve, good buddy?”
I panicked. My intelli-tracts skipped a line. Where did I what....????.....
I reluctantly removed the mittens exposing my upside-down inside-out hands.
"Ooooooohh," said the Officer looking at my invertedness. "Did you get that in combat? Which war, good buddy?"
There had been so many, many wars on this planet that, under the pressure of the moment, I could not keep straight the sequence of which one came before the other. “¿¿¿... the, uhh, the... Civil War...???”
“What?” shouted the policeman.
Szofia stepped up again. “He doesn't mean this country's Civil War, officer. Honest, he means, uh, some other people's civil war that this country generously instigated for them...”
I struggled to play along with Szofia' lead. “... uh, yes, Officer, the... uh... the Spanish Civil War...?
“DAD!!! I'm sorry, officer, he gets that way, sometimes. It was a head injury, you know - Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Kosovo, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Syria, Korea, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Arkanistan, Nitwardia, Buttoutia, Oilstanislaw... He was in all of them. Including all of the undeclared wars, too. He fought for one side or the other. Sometimes both sides simultaneously. The last one, that's where it happened - his hands, you see what I mean.”
Szofia lifted my handcuffed hands to show them to the policeman, then let them drop heavily. “See. They just couldn't sew him all back together normally again. It was kind of a medical screw-up. You know how those MASH units are, officer? And surgeons are just quacks, right.” Then she pointed at my head. “Also his hearing... it's real bad. Constant ringing. Real bad tinnitus from when the ammo dump exploded. He doesn't always clearly hear what you say.” Szofia reached up and gently stroked my head. I heard her whisper to me:
“Just keep your trap shut, Mr. Gasbag, and let me do all the talking, OK?”
The officer looked somewhat placated. “Wow. No kidding. A real war hero, eh? Well let's go, Mr. Nash, or is it... ?”
“... Sergeant. First Sergeant Major Hugo Nash with oak leaf clusterfuckers,” interjected Szofia. “Highly decorated, Mr. Police Officer, yessir. His uniform is covered with ribbons and awards: Bronze Star, Silver Star, Red Star, Neutron Star, Falling Star, the Congressional Medal of Dishonor, the Honorable Mention Medal, the Croix de Guerre, the Je Ne Sais Quoi Croix, the French Croissant, the Iron Cross, the Double Cross, Victoria Cross, Red Cross, Purple Cross, Crossed Eyes, Good Conduct Medal, Bad Conduct Medal, Purple Heart, Green Thumb, Purple Liver, Pink Eyes... you name it, he's got it.”
But the policeman clearly didn't believe what Szofia said. “Alright,” he announced. “Enough already. Watch your head when you get in, Sergeant Nash...” Szofia slid into the back seat next to me. “Hey, where are you going, kid? Get out of the car!”
“Well, can't I come with him? He's my daddy!” Szofia whimpered and fluttered her green eyelashes.
“Absolutely not. It's against regulations. Where's your mother, kid?”
“I don't have a mother,” sniffled Szofia.
I interjected hesitatingly “Officer... I am divorced... I think...?”
“Right,” added Szofia. “He's divorced. Mom… his ex... is a social media junkie and she watches daytime television and she’s a convicted jay-walker and she wears Birkenstock shoes and she lives in another city hundreds of thousands of miles away and she’s addicted to chocolate chip cookies like, she must eat a million of them a day... and Daddy has sole child custody.” She whimpered. “So if I can't go with you, I'll have to stay here all by myself...” She sniffled and whimpered.
The policeman was adamant. “Sorry. It's against regulations for anyone to get in the squad car with the detainee. Now get out of here, kid!”
Szofia whined. “But I'm just a LITTLE KID, officer, and I could get into TROUBLE and I might burn the house down playing with matches; or someone could break in and I could be KILLED or RAPED and then there would be a big, nasty news story that would go viral and YOU and this WHOLE STINKING CITY WOULD GET THEIR PANTS SUED OFF... AND you'd lose your retirement pension! So, whaddya say, let me just ride along with my dear old daddy to the police station... pretty please with sugar-sprinkled doughnuts on top, officer?” She whimpered and fluttered her eyelashes.
“NO!”
“Fuckhead.”
“What'd you say???”
“I just reminded my father to duck his head as he gets in and out of the police car.”
The policeman put his hand on his hips. “One more word out of you, you green-haired punk, and...”
But Zsssupft! and she was gone. The officer peered into the car, shrugged, slammed the back door, sat down in the driver's seat and took off with me... and Szofia... in the rear.
Or something that I assumed was Szofia, was sitting right next to me... in 4D, but not 3D in any way shape or form. It... she... looked like a cross between a saguaro cactus and a coastal redwood and a blackberry bush, though it - she - clearly was not a cactus or a blackberry or a coastal redwood, and it - she - extended through the roof of the car, or appeared to, because the "top" of Szofia (her "head" and her "eyes" and her "nose"??), like all the rest of her, was entirely in the 4th while the car was only in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd dimensions. And what looked like roots really were not, but were more like hundreds of gnarly legs with small feet and, what, rhizome-like toes? It was Szofia, of course, but sitting there in 4D, with her dozens of root-feet crossed and twiddling her rhizomes, serenely unseen by any of the local 3D fauna like the police officer driving us off to the station, but still highly visible to 5D me.
The police officer's radio was chattering loudly in the front.
“Szofia?” I whispered beneath the radio chatter.
“Doh. So who else would it be sitting next to you in the fourth dimension? Hugh, your molasses really runs kind of thick, you know, no offense intended.”
“You look so... different!”
She... it... turned to look at me. “So, Hugh, what do you look like au naturel? A helium balloon? A jellyfish? A bowl of plasma porridge?”
The policeman turned back toward me. “Hey, pipe down back there! If you're going to talk to yourself, talk quietly!”
We drove on in silence. Finally, I whispered to Szofia, “What are we going to do?”
She sounded amused. “We? I dunno, Hugh. Why don't you just siphon yourself into the 4th dimension like I did and leave old Mr. Police Officer with a pair of empty handcuffs á là Harry Houdini, eh?”
I was fluting gases all over the place. “Szofia, I do not do dimensional siphons, whatever that is. I am always in five dimensions, even though my alias body and the locals are only in three. Oiyoyoyei! What are they going to do with me?” I felt absolutely awful. Once again, I was a failure and my mission was about to be ruined.
Szofia, however, was unperturbed. “Who knows what they going to do with you, dude. Maybe they'll rough you up a bit, then put you up against a wall and shoot you, ah ha ha ha! But I would guess that they're just going to throw you in the slammer. Don't you watch any Hollywood movies, Daddy dear?"
The police car pulled in to the station.
Szofia got out before the policeman did and slipped out of the patrol car. As she ducked around the side she told me, “Don't sweat it, pops. I'll stand by you. Remember, I'm on the run from the Branch. I have to get back into three dimensions with all the rest of them because if I remained in 4D, then just like you Hooeydooey, without the camouflage of all these 3D animals, I'd stick out like the proverbial eggplant among the strawberries...”
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[Life Among the Three Dimensionals is a serialized sci-fi novel. Dazed and confused? Try reading it out loud to your cat, your dog or to a special (or not so special) human in your life. For earlier chapters click HERE.]