The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates

“home” nor did he think of his mother’s Upper East Side brownstone as “home” any longer: it was fair to say that Zallman had no home.
    It was near midnight of an unnamed day. He’d lost days of his life. He could not have stated with confidence the month, the year. His head throbbed with pain. Fumbling with the key to his darkened apartment he heard the telephone inside ringing with the manic air of a telephone that has been ringing repeatedly.
    Released for the time being. Keep your cell phone with you at all times for you may be contacted by police. Do not REPEAT DO NOT leave the area. A bench warrant will be issued for your arrest in the event that you attempt to leave the area.
    “It isn’t that I am innocent, Mother. I know that I am innocent! The shock of it is, people seem to believe that I might not be. A lot of people.”
    It was a fact. A lot of people.
    He would have to live with that fact, and what it meant of Mikal Zallman’s place in the world, for a long time.
    Keep your hands in sight, sir.
    That had been the beginning. His wounded brain fixed obsessively upon that moment, at Bear Mountain.
    The state troopers. Staring at him. As if.
    (Would they have pulled their revolvers and shot him down, if he’d made a sudden ambiguous gesture? It made him sick to think so. It should have made him grateful that it had not happened but in fact it made him sick.)
    Yet the troopers had asked him politely enough if they could search his vehicle. He’d hesitated only a moment before consenting. Sure it annoyed him as a private citizen who’d broken no laws and as a (lapsed) member of the ACLU but why not, he knew there was nothing in the minivan to catch the troopers’ eyes. He didn’t even smoke marijuana any longer. He’d never carried a concealed weapon, never even owned a gun. So the troopers looked through the van, and found nothing. No idea what the hell they were looking for but he’d felt a gloating sort of relief that they hadn’t found it. Seeing the way they were staring at the covers of the paperback books in the backseat he’d tossed there weeks ago and had more or less forgotten.
    Female nudes, and so what?
    “Good thing it isn’t kiddie porn, officers, eh? That stuff is illegal.”
    Even as a kid Zallman hadn’t been able to resist wisecracking at inopportune moments.
    Now, he had a lawyer. “His” lawyer.
    A criminal lawyer whose retainer was fifteen thousand dollars.
    They are the enemy.
    Neuberger meant the Skatskill detectives, and beyond them the prosecutorial staff of the district, whose surface civility Zallman had been misinterpreting as a tacit sympathy with him, his predicament. It was a fact they’d sweated him, and he’d gone along with it naively, frankly. Telling him he was not under arrest only just assisting in their investigation.
    His body had known, though. Increasingly anxious, restless, needing to urinate every twenty minutes. He’d been flooded with adrenaline like a cornered animal.
    His blood pressure had risen, he could feel pulses pounding in his ears. Damned stupid to request a polygraph at such a time but—he was an innocent man, wasn’t he?
    Should have called a lawyer as soon as they’d begun asking him about the missing child. Once it became clear that this was a serious situation, not a mere misunderstanding or misidentification by an unnamed “eyewitness.” (One of Zallman’s own students? Deliberately lying to hurt him? For Christ’s sake why ?) So at last he’d called an older cousin, a corporation attorney, to whom he had not spoken since his father’s funeral, and explained the situation to him, this ridiculous situation, this nightmare situation, but he had to take it seriously since obviously he was a suspect and so: would Joshua recommend a good criminal attorney who could get to Skatskill immediately, and intercede for him with the police?
    His cousin had been so stunned by Zallman’s news he’d barely been able to speak.