The "Jo Mhama" Case - Entry 7

I attempted to blame perspective for the walls of the myriad corridors closing in on me, but they continued to do so even as I sprinted down the hospital’s labyrinth of hallways. Perhaps I was feeling faint; my system may not have fully cleansed itself of the fedora-toxins, and I was an equilibrium-less butterfly swooping through rows and rows of bedpan-addled metallic carts - chrome-plated jungle-gyms containing the last vestiges of umpteen emptied colons.

By chance, I happened upon Jo Mhama’s room; I caught a glimpse of his nameplate, even though I was sure I had the right place based solely by the awkward and disjointed looks on the faces of the surrounding nurses. Jo Mhama’s eyes were gone...vacant, soft-edged holes sat where the eyes should have been, but by then the complete picture became abundantly clear: Mhama’s form was illusionary; his features had the kind of vague shape that one would admit to seeing if taken in just a glance, but the longer I looked at his slowly-disappearing form, the more it became apparent that, like a breath-soaked window, his personal architecture was fading away. Though his mouth still apparently worked, as it mind-numbingly jabbered without making a sound, the Mhama that had walked into the Lawson Detective Agency © Brand Office lo those many weeks ago was now...what? I squinted expertly, trying to distinguish exactly what the malleable contour of his body resembled, when an orderly with his hands under Mhama’s sheet inexplicably pulled out a brand-new fedora.

Stunned, I looked around, as most do when they are confronted with something too strange to comprehend, and saw a veritable mountain of fedoras both covering and surrounding a nearby chair. I abruptly asked the orderly if all the identical-looking hats were, indeed, identical, and he asked me what I cared; I flashed the expensive-looking-though-affordable-on-any-budget Lawson Detective Agency © Brand Badge, and he stuttered a stricken "yes".

I gathered my thoughts, along with a few of the hats, and noticed immediately that the creases in the top of said hats were markedly different. Were these the folded-skin peculiarities of a newborn baby’s face or something more? Could it possibly be an attempt at communication from a man trapped within his continually-morphing cage of a body? Had it really been more than three weeks since I’d had a coffee? I got a hold of Randy, also occupying this same hospital, and once I was certain that he was mobile, he was sent for some Bangkokian FeatherMash Coffee, as that was the ultimate in caffeinated flavour and full to the brim of what we at the LDA like to call Alertness Quotient, and we going to need every drop: deciphering hat folds from fedoras birthed by an old man’s appendix was, obviously, an all night job.

Entry 8