I managed to convince the receptionist to hand me the washroom key, which was chained to a shoehorn in the shape of Santa Claus, also in his red coat far from home. I wiped down my collar and dampened a wad of paper towel. With this I refreshed my face and cleaned my shoes. Then I took bus 67 to the police station on the corner of Rue Angers. I left my uncertainty tied to a fire hydrant out front. I stood tall and told the attendant that as a British army general stationed here for the month of September to take part in tactical exercises I needed to contact a suspect individual whom police here had also deemed of interest. The attendant did not want to tell me anything but he ended up rummaging online for the file in question and muttering that Harold had been taken by ambulance to one of the hospitals.

“Which hospital?” I asked. But by then the man had regained himself, and said he was not at liberty to tell me.

—

ABOVE HAROLD’S GURNEY HANGS a sign warning, in French, that wait-times cannot be predicted and anyone becoming belligerent will be prosecuted. The bloody bandage around Harold’s head seems to have dissuaded staff from kicking him off the gurney but does not press them to slow down or check on him as they hurtle down the corridor. The chaos reminds me of Culloden.

“I don’t mind waiting,” he says. “I quite like being still for hours.”

Harold knits and knits, forming tight circles like webs made by an industrious little arachnid. I discover he loves talking about himself. It turns out that on his one night in jail he staged a peaceful protest—they had not allowed him to knit—and he was beaten up by a Buddhist monk.

“He harmed me by accident.”

“But you said he came down hard on your head with a tray….”

“It was an accident of the heart. My philosophy on knitting made him snap.”

“Why was he in there in the first place?”

“He’d ignored several injunctions.” Harold touches his sore head. “He was banned from going into pet stores.”

“How many stitches did you say you had?”

“Stitches.” He laughs in his ruminating way that suggests he is reminded of things too odd for me to understand—I can see how he might have infuriated the Buddhist.

“You mentioned some astronomical number…what’s funny about…”

“You said the word stitches just as I was counting stitches.”

He knits and I sit with him, and in the seven and a half hours it takes for someone to finally attach an electronic monitor to track his brain signals he manages to run out of things to tell me about himself.