What's Wrong With This Picture?

Some things need little in the way of additional commentary:

The Feds in My Head
By BRUCE STOCKLER
Scarsdale, N.Y.

I FOUND the federal agent in the living room, listening to the phone messages. When I asked how he hacked my PIN, he laughed. He said not to worry about what specific agency he worked for, because everything was all very fluid now.

I support President Bush's pre-emptive foreign policy, and, frankly, I think we should be in Iran and North Korea and New Zealand, too, but the agent was interested not in my ideology but in my phone logs, and why I made so many calls to the chicken wing place, or why my phone number and a similar number signaled or alerted or chimed something somewhere in a black box or a piece of software. Or a bowl of water.

The television remote was missing from the den and the set stared back at me, accusingly. An agent from a different agency was downloading data from the cable box, and when I complained it was time for "Good Eats," with Alton Brown, I was told this was a poor choice of information, especially now, with things being the way they were, which was really, really unique, and difficult to process. Which should have been obvious to everyone. Which it was, in its own way.

I went into the library, where two agents were packing up my books and slotting brand-new ones onto the shelves. When I tried to look at the titles, one of them scratched my arm with a stone that made me feel drowsy and dehydrated and taller. The second agent held up my dog-eared copy of "The Catcher in the Rye."

"Do you consider this fiction or nonfiction?" she said.

"What do you think?" I said. The agents started text-messaging.

My wife constantly berates me for answering questions with a question, but I believe you are who you are, and if you can't express that essentiality, you might become someone else, and that would confuse people, especially those who aren't paying attention. "Can I answer that again?" I said. The agents ordered me out of the room.

I went into my home office to e-mail my brother Paul, a lawyer, but all my hardware and personal items had been replaced by an eclectic selection of ceramic figurines — unicorns, ballerinas, winking kitty cats. I tried going to sleep, but the agents were arguing loudly in the kitchen about how to turn on the coffeemaker. On my pillow was a note from my wife explaining that she needed to find a more appropriate life mate and had taken the kids to her sister's house where it was safer; but it was not her handwriting, and her sister lives on a houseboat and can't swim.

This morning I went to an Internet cafe to reach my clients and look for my family. I tried to buy a cup of coffee, because otherwise you can't use the computers, but the cashier said that, as of right now, they didn't accept cash. I knew my credit and debit cards would be invalid, so I gave up and sat on a bench. After a while two men offered to buy me breakfast. When they asked what was on my mind, I said "nothing." They said that was a very good start.

Bruce Stockler is a public relations consultant and writer.