In the Absence of Absalon

by Simon Okotie

  It was this: that it was unlikely that a domesticated animal could produce an item of clothing having rubber-like properties or a zip, buttons, Velcro or other means of fastening. On this basis he thought that it was highly unlikely that a single item of fur, wool, leather, skin of another sort, or any other shedding from an animal, domesticated or otherwise, could perform the task of completely covering the human body, that is to say the body of a typical human subject, if there were such a thing i.e. a typical human subject. But, in thinking this, he suddenly realised that he had been thinking about the size of the typical domestic or livestock animal compared to the size of the typical human subject, and that he’d also had in his mind the idea that the item of clothing would need to be tight fitting in the way that many modern items of clothes are (including, of course, his worn, in all senses of the word, trousers): for example following the lines (not straight of course) of the legs, arms, breasts, backside or other areas of the body. This did not need to be the case. If one were to imagine a smaller human subject and a larger non-domesticated or non-livestock animal such as a bear, then one could imagine that the skin of the latter could completely cover the body of the former even without the intervention of genetic modification. Perhaps the bear had died of natural causes and then its innards had been devoured by hyenas followed by vultures, both of which species got a bad press to his mind – they fulfilled a useful function, he thought, at the very least in the example that was currently unfolding in his mind (and in this case he wasn’t conscious of any queue of thoughts, as previously), leaving just skin and fur. It was quite possible to think, he thought, of a smaller human being with the ability to climb into that skin, a skin, note, that would completely cover his body. It is possible to imagine, also, that human subject walking back to the campsite inside that skin to scare his fellow campers; but that is beside the point. The point is this, in the current scenario it can truly be said that the item of clothing, if one can call it that, is truly ‘first-hand’ and if that person had simply donned the bearskin and walked to our investigator and handed it, one handed, to him, and that the latter had received it, one handed, then it could truly be said to be a second-hand item of clothing. It was only in a scenario such as the one that he had outlined that the purist can be satisfied that a second-hand item of clothing is literally second-hand. All other references to second-hand clothing are mere echoes of this ideal situation. Here (that is, in the impure case) second-hand is a metaphor, a short hand way of encapsulating the situation (and note that short- and second-hands refer not to the same specific hand; also note that first-hand knowledge and first-hand clothing4 refer (mostly) to quite different situations that are not to be confused).

  Satisfied that he had explored this area with a sufficient degree of thoroughness, and with his right hand still as it were ensconced within his right-hand trouser pocket, he used his gloved left hand to place his right-hand glove in his left-hand jacket pocket as a precursor, he hoped, to retrieving the keys from his left-hand trouser pocket and continuing his investigation into the disappearance of his colleague, Marguerite, last seen on the trail of Harold Absalon, the Mayor’s transport advisor, who had been missing.

  6

  Why, he now wondered in frustration, had he not instigated the search for the keys prior to arriving at the gate, particularly given that he now had pursuers bearing down upon him from left and right? Why, particularly given, we hope, his extensive experience in the field, had he not initiated the usual search prior to the retrieval of the keys in question – namely the patting of pockets that his uniformed colleagues were so familiar with perpetrating on others? This he could have initiated on himself prior to his arrival there to the extent that he would at least have known if he had the keys in his possession (and he strongly suspected that he did) and, further, would have been able to locate in which pocket the keys in question resided: right- or left-hand trouser pocket, to give just the main candidates? Certainly, now that he was in this position he was not going to wait until he had fully withdrawn the glove from his left hand before checking whether the keys were contained in the equivalent trouser pocket. Instead, having removed his gloved left hand from his left-hand jacket pocket, he started pulling on the middle finger of that glove with his teeth whilst simultaneously starting to withdraw his right hand from his right-hand trouser pocket with the intention that this hand would lend assistance by approaching that left-hand trouser pocket from the exterior, so as to initiate what’s known as a frisk, something that his uniformed colleagues would have had the pleasure of performing on many more occasions than himself.

  Typically perpetrated on another – and particularly, unfortunately (to his mind), on another of the same sex – the frisk involved patting, in particular, but also a little bit of rubbing and squeezing, with the aim of trying to locate, as he himself would shortly be doing with his right hand, items that were either forbidden under certain circumstances or which had been lost and were in the process of being searched for. There were a number of paradigmatic locations for the frisk: the police station or other place of incarceration being one, the airport being another. In the case of the latter, the reason for the frisk related but was not limited to metallic objects that may advertently or inadvertently cause harm to others either directly or through piercing the fabric of the aircraft, particularly when that aircraft was airborne, as it’s known, and particularly through the use of explosive materials which it was also the purpose of the frisk to locate.

  The officer in question would initiate the frisk by asking you to spread your legs and put your arms in the air, and he would ask you to do this in one or more of a number of ways, the primary one, given the language barrier that could often exist between agents and clients, to call them that, at international airports, being the mime, which is to say the officer in question would mime the actions of putting the arms in the air and spreading the legs him- or herself as a way of indicating to the client (and in the case where they suspected that the client had some contraband of some sort – a blade or other dangerous or potentially dangerous metallic object, narcotics or even just liquids – they would refer to that person as ‘the suspect’ although not necessarily to their face) what they wanted them to do. This mime might, in fact, just include the initial phase of the posture requested by the agent of the client/suspect: that of raising the arms, and this raising of the arms was, of course, a different raising of the arms to that requested – or demanded, often, for reasons that will become obvious – in the situation where firearms (not to be confused) were involved or potentially involved. There the requirement was to raise the arms and, by extension, the hands as high as possible, the purpose being to raise them to an altitude that was as distant as possible from the location or potential location of the firearm, which was typically in a holster, on a belt designed for the purpose of holding that holster, at, or hanging down from, the hip, or, for those working undercover, whether cops or robbers, as it were, in a holster concealed, by means of straps over the shoulder(s), inside one’s shirt or blouse.5 There, then, the request would be to raise one’s hands – and the formulation, classically, was to ‘put your hands up’ – rather than to raise one’s arms. Often the apprehending or arresting officer would, from behind (after the frisk, note, had perhaps been undertaken by a colleague from the front) carefully or roughly, depending on a number of factors that our investigator decided not to go into at that moment given the pressing nature of the activities he was engaged in, pull the suspect’s arms down one by one, often by the wrist, so as to handcuff them, with the handcuffs also being attached one by one, which is to say that he would pull one of the suspect’s arms down, from the back, as it were, generally respecting the anatomical constraints of that arm as he or she did so, then they would cuff that hand, or rather that wrist, before bringing the next and, one hopes, final arm down in a similar although symmetrical fashion, and cuffing that hand/wrist – making sure to cuff it to the other one, previously cu
ffed, as a means of restraining the suspect from using their arms, with the word ‘arms’ in this instance actually being quite broadly defined.

  The request to raise one’s arms prior to the frisk was different, then, to that of putting your hands up, he realised, as he started to pull, now, on the index finger of his left-hand glove with his teeth whilst continuing to withdraw his right hand from his right-hand trouser pocket, with the key difference relating, he thought, to ensuring that even the shortest officer (and there were, in his day, minimum height requirements for officers, if not for private detectives) would be able to reach the full extent of the arms during the frisk whereas there was no real requirement for this in the case of putting one’s hands up given that, in any case, one would hopefully be at some distance from the suspect in that situation and the intention was for them to put as much distance as possible between hands and firearm or potential firearm rather than being able to reach the full extent of the arms to complete the frisk. The key difference, then, he now realised as, travelling diagonally, given that it was moving down to the base of the opposite pocket, his right hand, having released itself from the constraints of the right-hand trouser pocket, passed towards his genital area (an area with which it had hitherto been in contact internally and secretly), en route to the left-hand trouser pocket – the external portion thereof – was that in one situation, one suspected (or, in some cases strongly suspected or simply knew, through observation) that the person in question had a firearm or firearms and it was for this reason that one need not necessarily frisk them, at least not until they had put their hands in the air, whereas in the other situation one simply needed, by a process of the elimination of evidence on a massive scale, to rule out the presence, hidden about that person, of firearms or other metallic objects of a dangerous or potentially dangerous nature.

  In demonstrating, then, through a momentary mime, given the linguistic constraints that were often attendant upon such interactions at international airports, the officer in question would typically indicate that the arms should be put up, and extended, at an angle of roughly one-hundred-and-thirty-five degrees, whereas in the situation where one requests or demands that the suspect put their hands up then this would typically be understood to represent an angle of one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, the reference point for both of these arm positions being, of course, the remainder of the body when viewed from the front or rear, given that these were typically the locations from which the frisk would be undertaken by the investigating officer. The one-hundred-and-eighty degree angle was the most appropriate in the situation, then, where one suspected that the subject, to call them that now, was in possession of one or more firearms, to prevent them from accessing those firearms at speed; in other words, the one-hundred-and-eighty degree angle implied, to those with a modicum of trigonomic understanding, the placement of the hands in question at the greatest distance from the pockets/holsters containing or potentially containing the firearm(s) in question such that, were the subject to attempt to access that firearm or those firearms at speed, as a means of initiating a shootout, as it’s known, which is to say the use of those firearms to facilitate their escape, then the officers in question would have given themselves the best chance of preventing the subject from accessing their firearm(s), given its or their distance from the subject’s arms and, more specifically, hands, particularly as they would presumably already be pointing their own firearms at the suspect in question as a means of deterrent and restraint. This contrasts, to summarise, with the situation in which the investigating officer does not suspect that the subject has hidden about their person a firearm or firearms but wishes, is requested or is required from a legal standpoint, to frisk that person to rule out the possibility of same. Here, then, whilst it is prudent for the arms to be at some distance from the likely locations for concealing blades and firearms (as well as other forbidden items, such as narcotics or even just liquids) it is also for the arms in question not to be so distant as to make frisking them uncomfortable or impossible for those officers who were short in relation to the subject in question. It was for this reason, he thought, as his right hand passed his left testicle en route to the left-hand trouser pocket and he started pulling on the ring finger of his left-hand glove with his teeth, that this more acute (although still, of course, obtuse in absolute terms) angle of one-hundred-and-thirty-five degrees was adopted or requested for this purpose, which is to say for the purpose of the frisk.

  The officer conducting the frisk would not typically mime the full extent of this one-hundred-and-thirty-five degree arm-angle given that it was so well represented in the cinema; nor would they even begin to mime the spreading, as it were, of the legs, which, note, did occur at an acute angle, with this angle being that subtended between the legs rather than to the subject’s centre line. The angle, given the geometry, that the arms made with each other was, of course, forty-five degrees; he suspected that the angle between the legs would be more like thirty or thirty-five, for those who want a complete and accurate record of this procedure. It would, he thought, be taken as read, as it were, that the legs should be spread following the officer’s indicative mime of the arm-spread. No mime was employed in the situation where the officer in question was requesting or demanding that the subject put their hands up – for what he hoped were, by now, obvious reasons.

  7

  As his right hand made contact with the exterior of his left-hand trouser pocket – without locating the key(s) therein – he realised that there were also rear pockets, which is to say that, as well as there being front trouser pockets – left and right – and jacket pockets – left and right – there were, of course, often, rear trouser pockets – left and right; he felt surprised and ashamed that he had not set this out previously, extending, as it did, by a factor of a half, the potential area of his search. Should he be sending a hand or hands around also to those pockets, just as, when casing a joint, as it’s known, one would send officers around to the rear so that, were the inhabitants to flee, a flight, of course, brought about by the entry through the front, and often with force, of investigating officers, then those fleeing in that way could be apprehended by those officers who had gone around the back in this way. Similarly, where drugs, say, were involved (and he had no reason to suspect that they were in the current case) then one might also even have to cover the drains (which is not to say that one would literally cover them, with a wo/manhole, but, in fact would uncover such wo/manholes) so that, similarly, one could apprehend, by sticking one’s rubber-gloved hand in at the moment of the toilet flush, typically – the contraband substances in this instance rather than persons in the process of committing an offence, as it would no doubt be put down in court.

  He couldn’t help noticing, as he refrained, in fact, from diverting either/both of his hands around to the rear of his trousers, to the single, in fact, pocket – buttoned, and to the right-hand side from his perspective (and from ours, given the fact that we are following in his footsteps, somehow, and, in so doing, facing, presumably, in the same, or a similar, direction to him), that references to going round the back as well as uncovering wo/manhole covers so as to stem the flow of contraband had the potential to take his investigation in a direction that he didn’t want it to go in, which is to say in a direction involving the most basic of bodily functions: defecating and urinating in particular. It’s not that he was squeamish about these things. Just because we have not seen him engaging in them does not, of course, mean that he does not regularly do so. There was plentiful time within which he could (although given the nature, urgency and continuity of his current investigation he thought it unlikely, in the current case, that he would have used the chapter breaks to avail himself of nearby facilities: makeshift, in the low-budget case where he had no back-up crew; mobile if he had, with the level of comfort and luxury therein no doubt dependent on his popularity or even notoriety as an investigator).

  It was not, then, that he was avoidi
ng these allusions through unfamiliarity. It was imperative, in fact, that, before each investigation, or rather, before each phase of each investigation, he use the available facilities so as to avoid an embarrassing interlude at a critical juncture: the moment of an arrest, say, or the gathering of a key piece of evidence during surveillance, or, as in the current case, the moment of entry into a property that could prove central to that investigation; an interlude, to spell it out, where he would have to go off, to find the little room set aside for the purpose and, therein, urinate and/or defecate (or, rather, urinate or urinate and defecate, given the difficulty, in his experience, of undertaking the latter without simultaneously although not necessarily continuously engaging in the former), regardless of how the chapter breaks fell.