(Introductory note: Up to this point in my book-in-progress on crime and corruption in the Fairfield County, Connecticut, legal system, I have been concentrating on the activity of the criminal element in the Fairfield County State's Attorney's office to simultaneously try to entrap me into a crime and cover-up the theft by Pullman and Comley law firm attorneys of about $6,000.00 of medical films of mine I left with them. (The working title of my book is now TENDRILS OF PATHOLOGY - CRIME AND CORRUPTION IN THE FAIRFIELD COUNTY LEGAL SYSTEM. Completed chapters plus related blog postings can be seen at henryberryinct.blogspot.com.) In previous chapters, I have also written about my investigations to try to understand the threats against me posed by the criminal state's attorneys and their accomplices in other parts of Connecticut government and the Pullman and Comley law firm. In this short chapter posted here, I turn to the psychological effects on me of my awareness that I was targeted for entrapment by criminal law-enforcement officials and the understanding I had gained of their deceptive, threatening tactics. The criminal attorneys were trying to fabricate appearances to justify their pathogenic activities and goals; they were trying to make their perversities appear legitimate, when in fact they knew they were pathological, socially intolerable, and aimed at an innocent individual as evidenced by their attempts to cover them up. In the next chapter I'll be posting, titled The Pool of Light, I'll be going more deeply into these psychological effects.)
13. The Occlusion of Reality
There was an incident where I stopped on my way back to my apartment in Black Rock, Bridgeport, to pick up something for dinner at a fish store in Fairfield after I had been to the Pequot Library in Southport. It was late afternoon. The only customer in the store, I had been taken care of quickly. I couldn't have been in the store for more than a minute or so.
The parking lot of the three shops stretched about thirty yards along the front of them, with cars pulling face-up to the stores between lines in the asphalt lot. Facing the stores, the fish store was on the right. I had parked in front of it.
I came out of the store at my usual brisk pace and passed down the right side of my car facing toward the store. I was looking slightly downward from having stepped off the edge of the walkway in front of the stores and keeping myself oriented to my car so I would not wander off into the lot where other cars might be pulling in. I was thinking only of getting home as quickly as possible to start to relax and have some dinner after a day of work and errands. As I passed around the back of my car, I lifted my head to look forward to see what I might encounter in pulling out of the lot. As if out of thin air, a Fairfield police car leaped into my vision. Black with white lettering and trim, it hadn't been there when I had gone into the shop. Since I had been inside only a minute, it must have pulled into the lot right after me. It must have followed me in, right?
I don't recall if I stopped dead in my tracks. My modus operandi was normal behavior as if I wasn't being watched or a target for entrapment. But I must have paused a brief second in my motion. I stopped breathing for a moment, and my mind swirled. It was as if the police car was not stationary, but was swirling around as if in a tornado along with other odd debris as in the movie "The Wizard of Oz." I felt as if I were seeing something unreal.
I moved along instinctively to the driver's door of my car, and got in. Continuing robotically to go through motions I knew by heart--as I have read combat soldiers unthinkingly react from hours of training when they come under surprise attack--I started my car and put it into reverse. Thinking brings fear with it. I was breathing again. The simple, familiar actions of getting my car going were like safety from my queasiness from the swirling.
Pulling my car forward to get back onto the road, I was facing toward the police car. As I pulled toward it toward the parking lot exit, I could see two police officers sitting in the front seat. The officer nearest me was a younger woman looking down at what must have been some paperwork she was working on as indicated by movements of her arms. In the passenger seat was a male officer whose age and movements I could not make out. While steering the car toward the exit, I watched intently out of the corner of my eye if either of them would break what seemed to me their studious indifference to glance toward me to take in the one who was the true reason for their stop.
Though neither of the officers ever looked at me nor seemed even much interested in me nor gave me any cause for alarm or curiosity about their presence, I couldn't help thinking they might be part of some elaborate operation of intimidation, surveillance, and entrapment being spun by the state's attorneys. Even though I often saw Fairfield police cars parked in open spots in store parking lots along this main road through Fairfield center, from the coincidence of my brief stop at the fish store and their sudden appearance in the parking lot, I was plagued by the thought that the Fairfield Police had now been woven into the state's attorneys' designs. Not even my reasoning that from all appearances the police car had stopped in the lot so a senior male officer and a rookie female officer could review something about her on-the-job training before she was put on patrol by herself could entirely dispel the suspicion.
My entertainment of possibilities was not irrational, however. Survival always requires heightened consciousness. The police car did not follow me out of the parking lot, I am sure. Nonetheless, the thought of it with all the attendant possibilities stayed with me, hovering like a dark cloud. The very indifference of the police officers could have been a clue of their mission of surveillance. I thought it somewhat unnatural that they did not look toward my car even as it came toward them as I was driving out of the parking lot. The lot was small, and I had to pass close to them. It seemed to me it would be natural for anyone to look toward a car moving toward them in such a circumstance as an instinctive safety measure. But as uniformed officers, if they were somehow cooperating with the state's attorneys, they would not want to do anything, not so much as glance toward me to display any sign of interest in me however natural or fleeting, in case this would arouse suspicions in me. On the other hand, state attorney agents wearing ordinary clothing in their mission of entrapment would have to do something to attract my attention. Otherwise, I wouldn't pay them any special attention, and there would be no chance of entrapping me by getting me to engage with them.
With my analytic acumen, philosophical bent of thought, and literary interests and impulses, I couldn't help but ponder the portent of the slightest details of the day which under normal circumstances would have gone by unnoticed. Although I wasn't watching for anything especially, a tone of voice, a tilt of a head, a glint in an eye, a too aggressive or a stray handing of change, almost any gesture, someone standing at a distance looking in my direction, cars traveling behind me on a road, neighbors coming in and out of their units in my apartment complex, other shoppers in the supermarket, hang-ups on my phone answering service, email spam for online pornography or financial investments, brief encounters with patrons in the libraries I went to for research in my work throughout Fairfield County, workmen around my apartment building, brought on unbidden, yet persistent musings about the extents and involutions of the plan to entrap me. I decided that I had been alerted to the first, primitive entrapment incidents because the movements of the women had been too mechanical, staged. I saw the indifference of the police officers in the patrol car and their concentration on something as an out-of-place solemnity hiding dark secrets. Many common such common daily incidents, like seeds of poisonous weeds in the wind, took root in my concern for my safety and freedom.
END
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