Free You Were Wrong by Matthew Sharpe

room, he took the opportunity of the self-imposed confinement to stand or sit or lie in every passage of that enclosure where his body would fit. He had stood, lonely as a bowling trophy, atop his dresser and surveyed the room from there as if looking down on an untrod valley populated with a host of wildflowers. He had reclined on his closet floor beneath piles of clothes and ancient broken toys and let himself, more than any man before or since, absorb by feel this singular location. At one of the exterior corners of his house, he had lain beneath the drainpipe in a rough storm and let his body be washed in the gushing rainwater’s myriad and sometimes physically painful impurities. He had done, though, for reasons that didn’t trouble him now, very little exploring of nearby towns and so was not immune to the pleasure of the unfamiliarity of the houses and trees and road signs and mailboxes and telephone poles that pirouetted past him out the window of the car this hot, fair weekend afternoon in his middle twenties on Long Island.
    He had begun to work on a problem connected to the recent event that was not the problem of how the law would treat it and him. He knew there was no reason for him to run toward or away from the law when he was, as they say, soaking in it. Not just police, lawyers, and judges, but neighbors, co-workers, students, a barking dog, his car’s tires, a blade of grass in the tread of his shoe, the broken cue on which his body’s signature juices and whorls had left their trace: what was the deep homily of the hundred mercifully distracting police procedurals that could be enjoyed on his television set at any hour of the night or day if it wasn’t that there was no thing living or otherwise that was not a potential agent or vessel of the law? The law was in each capillary of the world. He could spit out the window and his spit would be law. Were he launched into space in a transparent plexiglas egg, each cell in his body and every molecule of his surrogate womb would be law, the stars but law’s blind eyes gazing at him with cold impartiality. No, law was not the problem that beset Karl’s thoughts as he wandered the earth in his Volvo. He knew what the problem was but couldn’t yet translate it into the language of thought.
    Rising up before the hood of his car was not a town per se but an area of Centraldale zoned for commercial use. On his left and right were one-story shops with rectangular façades of plate glass. One of them was inevitably a place where American boys could put on white suits to learn to fight like boys from China and Japan. One was a place with people made of beige plastic in the window, looking serious and willful despite their festive Hawaiian shirts and bright beach hats. One had rows of magazines sun-faded to blueprint blue. One had doughnuts and crullers, one had dead fish on ice, one had money, one shoes, one tires, one would clean your clothes for you, one—whose clientele were mostly not from Centraldale—would darken your skin. The off-track betting shop had men out front smoking in their cheap lightweight jackets, waiting for their long-shot horse to win, as Karl too had proverbially done for years. At the end of a row of shops was a business that did not have a plate-glass window and whose regular head-and-shoulder-size windows were dark, but which he knew nonetheless to be open; he parked his car and went into it. He paused inside the door and slowly let his optic nerves absorb what little light there was, as if sitting in a darkened auditorium while the lights gradually came up on act I of the local community theater’s production of Othello . The room was long and thin. The bar was to his left and ran most of the length of the room. To his right were a few small tables and a jukebox. The smell was of beer and vague inoffensive BO, lightly lysoled. At the far end of the bar, a beautiful woman swayed—not drunkenly. Foremost in his ear were the badly played