John carefully steered his cup of coffee, held at arm’s length in front, through the maze of silent men staring motionless up at a ball bouncing around a television screen nestled in the corner of the ceiling, to the door and outside, to a table wobbling there, and pulled the day’s fat roll of newspapers out from under his arm.

No sooner did he sit down when who should happen along but Luke?

“Get out of here,” Luke said to John. “I was coming here.”

Not bothering to look up, John moaned impatiently, “Room enough for both of us. Anyway forget about going inside, there’s a line-up. Soccer game.” He tilted his head toward the window. “Go somewhere else,” he said, his eyes lazily scanning headlines at the top of the newspaper sections he flipped through on his lap, K-Tel like.

“Save my chair,” Luke said, sliding toward the door but casting a suspicious glare through the big window like he was contemplating entering a bear’s den.

“No,” John said.

Ten minutes later, Luke resurfaced from deep in the sea of cologne, sweat and stinky socks balancing a cup on a saucer and angling his ass around to drop into the chair that of course John saved for him.

“You’ll like this one,” John said, shoving the front page of one of his papers under Luke’s nose. “One of your kind. Some guy running in the election thinks Elvis drove the airplanes to Mars on 9/11. Looks like a potential reader for your novel, Luke.” John couldn’t help smirking.

“Holy shit . . .” Luke muttered under his breath, bringing the front page closer to his face.

“He’s in all the papers, look at this, every paper, what did this guy do?” John pulled all the relevant pages free of their sections and stacked them up, excited to see something of interest in the papers for a change.

Luke picked them up as John laid them down, amazed. “He cheered when the buildings fell down. Oh my god, he’s toast. Who was he?” Luke looked up and down and side to side over all the pages.

“I’m reading, I’m reading,” John replied through a big smile. “He wasn’t anybody. I never heard of him, anyway. He’s running with a fringe party.”

“There’s not even an election on,” Luke muttered, alarm growing in him like an approaching siren.

“Green Party, it seems,” said John, almost unable to contain an outburst of laughter any longer. “Says here the leader of the party called him ‘despicable’.” He was nearly squealing with delight now.

Luke was studying the story in front of his face slowly. “Not even a candidate yet, they never signed him on, it says, and there’s not even an election called, and he’s not even a guy anyone ever heard of.” Luke pulled the next page over top of the last and grew increasingly rigid in his chair.

John lifted out and folded over another page, grinning broadly. “Well, he’s been heard of now. Look, pictures of him inside, holding a press conference. ‘Celebrated the attacks on New York and the 3,000 deaths,’ it says under the picture.” John whistled. “Hoo-whee, he’s even further round the bend than you, Luke!”

“It says in this story that he denies it.” Luke moved his finger along lines of text in the paper the better to carefully read every word and not miss anything, any clue. “He says he was speaking symbolically.” Luke studied the picture John shoved in front of him, not the face, but the background, trying to figure out where and when it was taken, trying to see if there is a clock or some other clue in the picture, some way of checking if it’s a faked picture, if there were any anomalies in it.

John sipped from his coffee cup with more glee in his eyes than he had had in weeks. “He’s been thrown out of his party, it says.” Gurgle, slurp. John almost began giggling and nearly lost his mouthful of coffee. “I guess that puts an end to any of your plans for running for public office, huh?” he managed to squeeze out before finally bursting out laughing.

But there was a tinge of evil in that laughter too. Twenty-four years cooped up in the same broken house with a person will do that to someone.

Luke was oblivious to John’s provocations though. He was too intensely studying the papers, moving from story to story, paper to paper, as though an important clue was scurrying through the actual paper just one step ahead of him. “He didn’t even say it, he wrote it, and it was five years ago!”

John was still laughing but managed to settle himself down enough to squeeze out another taunt: “Imagine what they’ll do to you when they find what you’ve been writing the last five years,” before erupting in a roar of laughter all over again. God it felt good to laugh, too. Before this day there’d been nothing much to laugh about in John’s life, only a lot of stress bottled up deep inside him. The result was a laugh deeper, longer, and more intense than you’d expect for a fairly mild joke. It was the kind of laugh that begins to sound like a cry if you’re not laughing along.

Luke was not laughing along. He remained quite unaware of anything that was funny about any of this. He stared off somewhere into the back of the fruit and veggie store across the street thinking: what indeed had he written in people’s blogs and on emails and submitted stories the last five years that could also make him “look pretty bad,” he muttered barely out loud.

“The thought police,” John teased Luke further, leaning over the table between them. “They’re out there, you know.” More giggling. “And everybody starts publishing blogs, putting all their little thoughts right out there, on the record, in print, just to make it easier for the thought police.” John bent over far enough to get right into Luke’s line of vision with a big huge smile. “They made it easy for everyone to record their thoughts, they gave them the internet and hooked them all up and invented blogs for them” he erupted in hearty laughter one more time.

Luke pushed the palm of his hand into John’s face.

“Every thought everyone ever recorded is probably logged, stored and tagged,” John pressed on through Luke’s greasy fingers. “Years and years of blogs, emails, everything anyone stores on any servers. Sentences and sentences, every one of them,” John struggled to pull Luke’s hand away, “taken out of context . . . .”

John and Luke’s hands, in a saw-off of force against force a couple of inches from John’s face, stayed there as they both began to relax their muscles, Luke because his thoughts were racing through his mental archive, John because he realized the truth of what he had just said.

“Well,” John announced perfunctorily, straightening back up and randomly pulling a section of newspaper in front of his face again, “it only matters if you go sticking your nose in somebody else’s business, like thinking you can run for public office or something.” He moved on to the next subject now that the previous one had lost all its joy.

“Did you get any work done last night?” Luke asked him, that novel contest always being so close to the surface. He had secretly listened at John’s door to hear if there was any keyboard tapping but had heard only a strange muffled groaning.

“Almost finished,” John replied, slipping back behind his façade again. “Nothing in my computer going to get me in trouble, it’s all 11th Century.” Gurgle slurp at the edge of his coffee mug. “Maybe that’s long ago enough we can safely talk about what happened then.”

“Unlike 9/11,” Luke breathed in.

“How’s the work going with you,” John asked, genuinely concerned. They were, after all, going through the same ordeal. But still he didn’t look up from his paper, no need to show that much concern.

“It’s hard, it keeps shifting, I can’t settle on what is the main text and what are the subtexts.” Luke stared at the headline saying “Pro-al-Qaida candidate pumped fist in air when buildings fell.” “And now this, now it’s going political. I have to shift everything, a total rewrite.”

Luke was thinking more about his emails and his postings at other people’s blogs. He wrote things in public far more incriminating than what that politician-caught-in-the-headlights ever wrote. Maybe it isn’t just public figures who have to worry, he thought. Maybe anyone with a job or trying to get one, anyone applying for a mortgage, anyone trying to get a car loan or credit card, anyone trying to join anything at all, a gym, a library, a bird-watching club. “Luke’s views are antithetical to those of the Stanley Park Binocular Society and we have asked him to leave.”

It’s not like the thought police would announce their arrival, it’s not like the concept would arrive in a way that would be immediately noticed and resisted. If thought police are to become part of the everyday landscape, it’ll happen in these small, justifiable steps. One person here, someone everyone agrees had the wrong thoughts, another person there, also caught thinking incorrectly. It builds up like that, slow as grass growing, till you’ve got a tangled thicket no mower can plough into.

“The next one won’t make the front page,” he said to no one because John didn’t look like he was listening anymore. “Then the one after that won’t even make the papers at all.” John’s momentary shiver behind his paper betrayed that he was indeed listening. That’s what happened to the whole city of Timbuktu, he suddenly realized. It was thought-policed right out of history. Hey! Can it be he finally had a start to his novel?